How to Find the Distance to Far Away Galaxies

Galaxies are masses of stars which contain essentially all types of matter in the universe. All galaxies are several orders of magnitude larger than our solar system and contain hundreds of millions of stars. A number of galaxies are visible to the naked eye and amateur astronomers with even the least powerful telescopes can easily find at least some galaxies in the night sky. Measuring the distance to galaxies is problematic in that as the universe is constantly expanding at an increasing rate, is remains a challenge to find comparable stellar masses of known distance and luminosity in order to gauge the relative distances of other galaxies. All existing methods of measurement are essentially relative measurements with highly variable accuracy.

Things You'll Need

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Instructions

    • 1

      Download and install software from the resources section for viewing existing telescopic observations. Ground based telescopes cannot detect extremely distant galaxies and the Hubble Space Telescope can only detect Cepheids (the stars from which other unknown distances are gauged) roughly 6 times more distant than ground telescopes.

    • 2

      Locate a Cepheid variable star within the galaxy whose distance you wish to find. A Cepheid variable in this case will represent the marker for which we will compare to bodies of known distance and luminosity, known as standard candles.

    • 3

      Determine the period of variability of the Cepheid. Measure this against the periods of stars with known luminosities in our galaxy, in order to determine its brightness.

    • 4

      By measuring the brightness (magnitude) of the Cepheid in the distant galaxy, you can determine its distance using the inverse square law. Where R = 10 ^ 1+0.2(m -- M) parsecs, input the absolute magnitude m and apparent magnitude M to solve for the distance of the galaxy.

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