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The work that made Hubble famous was built on a slightly earlier discovery by Henrietta Leavitt that variable stars had a relationship between their absolute br
by hotpotamus 4y ago
The work that made Hubble famous was built on a slightly earlier discovery by Henrietta Leavitt that variable stars had a relationship between their absolute brightness and their period[0]. These were the early "standard candles" that Hubble used to start sorting out distances to objects within our galaxy and when he first realized that the Andromeda Galaxy is not local to us, but its own separate galaxy. Things have gotten on a lot since then, but the basics of how it was done are extremely approachable, astronomy 101 stuff.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Period-luminosity_relation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Period-luminosity_relation
- privong 4y agoJust to add that that only works for specific types of stars that have regular pulsations. It can be used to infer distances to other types of stars if you have good cause to think that the pulsating star is in the same place as the other stars. This works for clusters and stellar associations, but not for the "field" stars in the galaxy.