Tag: standard candle

Blast From The Past

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A supernova is the death blast of a giant star, far larger than our Sun.  Massive stars go out with a bang, outshining entire galaxies, allowing us to see them across the universe.  A supernova observed in 2013 occurred in a distant galaxy and took over 30 Million years to reach Earth, where the timing was perfect for us to observe and study it.  And now that it’s been studied, the explosion was truly the death of a giant. The supernova, named 2013 ej, was discovered in June 2013 in the galaxy M74 in the constellation Pisces.  It was the closest supernova...

Powerful New Method for Distances

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Ask an astronomer what the hardest thing to do is in astronomy, and chances are they will say ‘measuring distance accurately.’  It is surprisingly difficult to take the light from stars we see and match them to a correct distance.  In the past we have used several different methods depending on how close a star is to us.  For the nearest stars we use parallax, which looks at the change in a star’s position as the Earth is on opposite sides of it’s orbit. All other methods rely on what we call the standard candle approach.  Let’s say you had...