Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
A classical Cepheid's luminosity is directly related to its period of variation. The longer the pulsation period, the more luminous the star. The period-luminosity relation for classical Cepheids was discovered in 1908 by Henrietta Swan Leavitt in an investigation of thousands of variable stars in the Magellanic Clouds. [23]
In astronomy, a period-luminosity relation is a relationship linking the luminosity of pulsating variable stars with their pulsation period. The best-known relation is the direct proportionality law holding for Classical Cepheid variables , sometimes called the Leavitt Law .
[1] [2] They are population II stars: old, typically metal-poor, low mass objects. [ 1 ] Like all Cepheid variables , Type IIs exhibit a relationship between the star's luminosity and pulsation period , making them useful as standard candles for establishing distances where little other data is available [ 3 ] [ 4 ]
On page 302–303 of his journal article, he wrote that "The strongly condensed luminous system appears imbedded in a large and more or less homogeneous mass of great density" and although he went on to speculate that this mass may be either extremely faint dwarf stars or interstellar gas and dust, he had clearly detected the dark matter halo ...
Pulsating variable stars sometimes have a single well-defined period, but often they pulsate simultaneously with multiple frequencies and complex analysis is required to determine the separate interfering periods. In some cases, the pulsations do not have a defined frequency, causing a random variation, referred to as stochastic.
The time separation of peaks in the light curve gives an estimate of the rotational period of the object. The difference between the maximum and minimum brightnesses (the amplitude of the light curve) can be due to the shape of the object, or to bright and dark areas on its surface.
Luminous intensity is the perceived power per unit solid angle. If a lamp has a 1 lumen bulb and the optics of the lamp are set up to focus the light evenly into a 1 steradian beam, then the beam would have a luminous intensity of 1 candela.
The mass-to-light ratios of galaxies and clusters are all much greater than ϒ ☉ due in part to the fact that most of the matter in these objects does not reside within stars and observations suggest that a large fraction is present in the form of dark matter. [2]: 368