Definition
Luminous means emitting or reflecting light, or full of light; illuminated.
Pronunciation
US English
UK English
See Synonyms, Antonyms and Usage
Excerpts from News Articles
1
Armani called his last haute couture collection "Petillant" — sparkling. The weightless fabrics of his ready-to-wear collection for Spring-Summer 2023 shimmer with gold and silver, counterpointed by luminous evening shades of blue and purple. It may well be more a reflection of my own needs at the moment, but I'm detecting a spiritual thread in this glimmer of the great beyond.
2
The women in Khosravi's paintings are often depicted as bound by strings or concealed behind walls, flowers or hands in what she describes as a struggle for autonomy. Yet, they possess a commanding presence. She contrasts cords and shackles with expressions of freedom such as doves. With lush colors and areas of radiance in which her subjects' body parts seem to glow, Khosravi's artworks aren't somber, but luminous .
3
Until now, we've known Vermeer as a methodical and sublime artist, a magical painter of light and luminous moments of 17th-century Dutch middle-class life. He captures arresting domestic scenes: women reading or writing letters, a housemaid pouring milk, a woman playing a lute, a young girl wearing a pearl earring.
4
The colliding galaxies, known collectively as Arp 220, generated an infrared glow that contains the light of more than 1 trillion suns. For comparison, the Milky Way galaxy has a luminosity that is the equivalent of about 10 billion suns.
5
Seven decades since her death, and nine since the groundbreaking premiere of her Symphony in E minor, her luminous music is enrapturing audiences worldwide. Most recently, the London-based Chineke! Orchestra highlighted that symphony on its debut North American tour, which has included stops at Lincoln Center and Jordan Hall in Boston, where Price herself performed as a New England Conservatory pupil. She has amassed a recorded catalog that includes recent Grammy Award-winning albums by the Philadelphia Orchestra and the New York Youth Symphony.
6
Some Florentines grumbled that an untrustworthy Spaniard was roaming the Medici palace, but, on the whole, the arrival of this foreigner into the ruling family was a success. The Medici dynasty would rule Florence for the next two centuries; without that luminous painting, friend and foe may have looked differently on Cosimo and his radiant wife. Put simply, the portrait helped to set the course of Italian history.
7
This supermassive black hole resides in a galaxy called Messier 87, or M87, about 54 million light-years from Earth. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km). This galaxy, with a mass 6.5 billion times that of our sun, is larger and more luminous than our Milky Way.
8
The drugs were stored in some 70 waterproof packages which can be seen floating in the sea in pictures shared by authorities. Every package was carefully sealed and kept together by fishing nets, and also containing a luminous device which authorities said allowed the illegal parcels to be tracked.
9
“In her clear, concise prose, Chung makes the personal political, tackling everything from America’s crushingly unjust health care system to the country’s gauzy assumptions about adoption, a practice that is itself rooted in economic inequality. Her observations are particularly timely at a moment when life expectancy in the United States is falling … Chung writes with aching and transcendent longing — for a past she never had; for her flawed home state; and for a more compassionate future … With this work, Chung offers a luminous addition to the literature of loss.”
10
Drawing on her experiences in wartime London, Bowen’s spy novel captures a surreal and heady time lived out between bombings, in which loyalty, truth and identity are just as precarious as survival. Stella Rodney is caught between her lover Robert, a spy, and Harrison, a counter-spy who is obsessed with Stella and tries to convince her that Robert is a traitor. Bowen’s prose is luminous and the claustrophobic atmosphere of the novel will stay with you long after you close its pages.
11
Imminent threat to life assuaged, there was only one thing on everyone’s mind: Would she still show up? She was scheduled to speak the following day. Surely it was just as easy for a luminous celebrity to helicopter into Rome as into Florence? Perhaps even easier? Jade and Tenneal were hesitantly optimistic; the Goop girls made no mention of the very pretty elephant in the room, but sent us updates: “To roll with Mercury in Retrograde, we’re adding something fun to the Goop at Sea schedule today,” read a WhatsApp message. “Our psychological astrologer, Jennifer Freed, is going to be doing impromptu group tarot sessions for us.
12
In a study published in 1891, one observer described a “ luminous band extended east and west,” like a straight tail of a large comet. In 1933, aurora pioneer Carl Stormer snapped an early image of the occurrence in a black-and-white photo.
13
After all, they had Adama Sanogo, the Final Four most outstanding player and big man from Bamako, Mali, who rocked the nutty tournament with 120 points and 59 rebounds while shooting 50 for 75, with 17 points and 10 rebounds and one large tap-in on closing night. “I’ve had a chance to be in the Final Four, and I definitely — I’ll remember it forever, and it’s something I will never forget in my life,” said Sanogo, his face luminous . He became “an all-time great” at Connecticut, Hurley said, as a smattering of all-time Connecticut greats looked on from the stands.
14
A paper describing the findings, ‘A 0.9% calibration of the Galactic Cepheid luminosity scale based on Gaia DR3 data of open clusters and Cepheids’, was published this week in Astronomy and Astrophysics.
15
When the Sun is only partially hidden (partial eclipse), the UV and IR radiation is as important as in full sunlight. However, because of the reduced luminosity , we no longer have the natural reflex of turning our eyes away. So it may seem more comfortable to observe the sun for several seconds or even minutes.
16
He enjoyed great fame for his early work – especially upon publication of the first (and best) of his two collections, Cinnamon Shops (1934), (later translated into English as The Street of Crocodiles). These luminous stories explored an intimate private realm of mothers, sisters and maids, swirling gradually outwards into wider reflections on starry nights filled with wonder, until it sometimes feels as if Schulz were exploring the entire universe as it echoed through the cobbled, convoluted streets beyond his front door.
17
In Curtis Sittenfeld’s luminous third novel, she gives her twin leads a power befitting the magic of sisterhood. I’ll never forget reading Sisterland, fervently speeding through the pages, desperate to soak up the story of identical twins Violet and Kate and their visions.
18
This back-of-hand familiarity was apparent on Tuesday, the “Sinfonia” cohering more cleanly that I’d experienced it at the Kennedy Center (where the hall’s acoustics gave Walker’s nuances a raw deal). Noseda extracted rich color from its catastrophic blasts of horns and climbing strings, and ably guided the orchestra through its constantly shifting terrain — a stretch of long, luminous calm; a furtively plodding passage flecked with percussive punctuation; the mounting cataclysm of its close.
19
Anyone who decades ago saw Robert Hughes’ The Art of Australia was instantly made conscious of a critic who was also a supreme entertainer quite comparable to Kenneth Clarke in Civilization and the sense of Hughes was consolidated by the later art histories The Shock of the New and American Visions. That booming Sydney voice, that magnificent command of metaphor, that frog-leap over art criticism which created that luminous and epical work of history, The Fatal Shore.
20
But Barbara's own personal struggles — she's an artist who gave up a rewarding teaching career in New York to be a stay-at-home suburban mom — are no less dramatic than her daughter's. McAdams is simply luminous as a woman trying to strike a balance between sensible authority figure and boho free spirit.
21
Quasars have the same luminosity of a trillion stars contained in a space about the size of our solar system — which only hosts one star, while the Milky Way galaxy is home to at least 100 billion stars.
22
A Kensington Palace exhibition earlier this year included six miniature portraits, delicately painted on to thin sheets of ivory, which was used regularly in the 18th century due to it luminosity .
23
Cosmologists have long supposed the energetic outflows exist around black holes at the center of most large galaxies and improving our understanding of them could help form models of the physics of active galactic nuclei (AGNs), the squished-in zone in the middle of galaxies where all the action is. AGNs are more luminous than the rest of the galaxy because of the jets of light and energy emitted by dust and gas falling into a black hole in a process called accretion.
24
Of the 52 paintings by Canaletto listed in the RCT catalogue, only 24 are at identified locations: 12 luminous views of the Grand Canal are in a small room down a corridor off the Cumberland Gallery in Hampton Court Palace (adult entry fee £26.10), and another 12 are in Buckingham Palace (£90, or £30 in August and September), although not all of those are in the visitable picture gallery. Others are in rooms closed to the general public.
25
Once I stopped doom-scrolling, I became conscious of a change in mental tempo that comes when you no longer interrupt your own thought processes with a luminous screen. The search for news had rarely been the real reason for taking my phone out of my pocket. Nine times out of ten, there would be no particular thing I was looking for, no destination, just a vague itch to scratch.
26
The year 1874 was chiefly notable for the development of Manet’s friendship with the young Impressionist painter Claude Monet, with whom he painted on the banks of the Seine (when they had first met in 1866, the relationship was rather cool). Manet painted his most luminous plein-air picture, Boating (1874), which was set in Le Petit Gennevilliers and depicted two figures seated in the sun in a boat.
27
And there are no better beaches in Thailand than those you find in Krabi. With luminous turquoise waters, bright white sands and rugged green cliffs, these beaches won’t disappoint even the most seasoned traveller.
28
Years after the hunger she became one of the twentieth century’s best known actresses, and at the end of April 1990 she was declared a star of the botanical world in the Netherlands. The Dutch bulb industry paid tribute to her by naming a white variety of the flower with exceptional luminosity , the Audrey Hepburn tulip.
29
"This took a planetary orbit that may have existed stably for millions or billions of years, and caused it to plunge suddenly into the star, powering the emission that we see. Essentially, the star swallowed its planet so suddenly that we got to see its energetic burp," MacLeod said, referring to some material expelled into space in a luminous flare. "Intense heat eventually rips the planet apart, and its material is mixed throughout the star."
30
Asghar's When We Were Sisters is a coming-of-age novel that follows three orphaned Muslim-American siblings left to raise one another in the aftermath of their parents' death. The prize jury wrote that Asghar "weaves narrative threads as exacting and spare as luminous poems," and their novel is "head-turning in its experimentations."
31
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researcher Kishalay De spotted the luminous outburst in 2020 while reviewing sky scans taken by the California Institute of Technology's Palomar Observatory.
32
Yet further investigation revealed that the luminosity of ZTF SLRN-2020 was much lower than for other red novae, suggesting that an object smaller than a star was involved in the merger event, she said.
33
The movie has all the trappings of a serious nonfiction assessment: scholars, critics, curators and luminous comrades speaking to the humor, funk, atmosphere and texture of the Hammons experience, the acid and ingenuity, the bang of it.
34
“A debut novel written by a skilled, assured hand, When We Were Sisters absolutely dazzles. Following three orphaned Muslim American siblings as they navigate great loss and painful comings of age, Fatimah Asghar weaves narrative threads as exacting and spare as luminous poems, their fragility a mere guise for their complete, unflinching indestructibility. Noreen, Aisha, and Kausar show us what they truly need to survive, even when everything seems taken away.
35
Scientists on Monday unveiled observations by the James Webb Space Telescope showing new details about such features around a luminous star called Fomalhaut in our own neighborhood of the Milky Way galaxy. These observations of three concentric dusty rings of debris orbiting Fomalhaut provide the fullest view to date of such structures outside our solar system.