Street lights as standard candles: A student activity for understanding astronomical distance measurements [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1702.02391


Astronomers measure cosmic distances to objects beyond our own galaxy using standard candles: objects of known intrinsic brightness, whose apparent brightnesses in the sky are then taken as an indication of their distances from the observer. In this activity, we use street lights and a digital camera to explore the method of standard candles as well as some of its limitations and possible sources of error.

Read this paper on arXiv…

M. Possel
Thu, 9 Feb 17
52/67

Comments: 7 pages, 7 figures