n order to calculate how far away a star is, astronomers use a method called parallax.

Because of the
Earth's revolution about the sun, near stars seem to shift their position against the farther stars. This is
called parallax shift. By observing the distance of the shift and knowing the diameter of the Earth's orbit,
astronomers are able to calculate the parallax angle across the sky.

The smaller the parallax shift, the farther away from earth the star is. This method is only accurate for
stars within a few hundred light-years of Earth. When the stars are very far away, the parallax shift is too
small to measure.

The method of measuring distance to stars beyond 100 light-years is to use Cepheid variable stars.
These stars change in brightness over time, which allows astronomers to figure out the true brightness.
Comparing the apparent brightness of the star to the true brightness allows the astronomer to calculate
the distance to the star. This method was discovered by American astronomer Henrietta Leavitt in 1912
and used in the early part of the century to find distances to many globular clusters.
The distance of planets,star,galaxies

Stars are a bit more complicated: distance to relatively close ones can be derived from the parallax they
have. As the Earth completes a revolution around the Sun, at 6 months interval, the position of a nearby
star relative to a background of more distant stars would seem to shift due to the slight angle change. A
slender triangle is thus constituted, having the Earth orbit as a base. The slim angle of the apparent shift
allows calculating the distance.

Knowing the distance to relatively close stars has allowed to develop a color to brightness relationship
(spectral class). Knowing how bright a star should be in absolute term and how dim it appears to us is
thus a function of how far away it is.

There are other so called standard candle, like Cepheid variables stars, where the brightness is relater to
the period of change; or supernova which would also have an absolute brightness to time relationship.

Those very bright stars could be use to gauge the distance to relatively nearby galaxies, which in turn
allowed the derivation of a distance to speed relationship, that is the more distance a galaxy moves
away from us in this expanding universe, the further it is (evidently, as it had more time to get further
away since the Big Bang). Using the red shift value of the spectrum (Doppler effect tells us the speed)
one can get a good estimate of how far away the galaxy should be.
 PROJECT
IN
SCIENCE
KYLE JOPHER SY SUBMITTED TO: MISS LYN

8- HUMILITYs