Question

What does it mean if a star has a high absolute brightness and a low apparent magnitude?

Answer 1

-- A star has a high absolute brightness: It's a very bright star. You'd see that if you were close enough to it.

-- The star has a low apparent magnitude: When you're in your back yard looking at it, it looks very dim. Maybe it's so dim that you can hardly see it.

-- If this is the SAME star ... it's actually very bright but from your back yard it looks very dim, this means that the star is very very very very far from Earth.

Answer 2

Absolute brightness: The apparent brightness a star would have if it were placed at a standard distance of 10 parsecs from Earth

low apparent magnitude: 1 to 6 scale to compare star brightness, with 1 being the brightest and 6 the faintest.