2min chapter

In Our Time: Science cover image

The Death of Stars

In Our Time: Science

CHAPTER

Standard Candles in Astronomy

A standard candle is an object of great importance to astronomers because it lets us measure how far away objects are. The type that i study are these therma nuclear supernove explosions of white dwarf stars. They outshine entire galaxies, and you can see them billions and billions of light years away. That means they're an exceptional measure of distance in the universe. So there were pioneering studies in the 19 nineties trying to find all of these distant, some of these distant supernove and to map out the large scale geometry of the universe. And what they discovered was that the universe was expanding, but it was doing so at an ever faster rate. It's almost as if there were

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