Moment magnitude scale released, and an increase of two steps corresponds to a 10 (1,000) times increase in energy. Thus, an earthquake of "M" of 7.0 releases about 32 times as much energy as one of 6.0 and nearly 1,000 times one of 5.0. The moment magnitude is based on the seismic moment of the earthquake, which is equal to the shear modulus of the rock near the fault multiplied by the average amount of slip on the fault and the size of the area that slipped. Since January 2002, the MMS has been the scale used by the United States Geological Survey
Magnitude (astronomy) by astronomers are: The difference between these concepts can be seen by comparing two stars. Betelgeuse (apparent magnitude 0.5, absolute magnitude −5.8) appears slightly dimmer in the sky than Alpha Centauri (apparent magnitude 0.0, absolute magnitude 4.4) even though it emits thousands of times more light, because Betelgeuse is much farther away. Under the modern logarithmic magnitude scale, two objects, one of which is used as a reference or baseline, whose intensities (brightnesses) measured from Earth in units of power per unit area (such as watts per square metre, W m) are and , will have magnitudes and related by