Suzie's Thoughts on Stars

Every girl loves to see a shooting star or a meteor shower. It brings us luck and symbolizes something special, like a sisterhood bond. Well what about seeing a pulsing star? The “Photometric Observations of Cepheids” article explains, in depth, the exploration to find new Cepheids. Cepheids, (I had to look up, because unless you are an astronomy major, I’m guessing you did not know it either!) are large, hot stars that have masses of five to twenty times greater than that of the Sun and are up to 30,000 times more luminous! Because they are so bright, Cepheids can be seen from very far distances. One-hundred light years far away to be exact, which was the distance a Cepheid was viewed from the Hubble Space Telescope!

Observations have been performed by a telescope from the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) from December 2006 to January 2008, to monitor thirty-three classical Cepheids. Because these pulsating stars are so visible, astronomers use Cepheids as distance indicators and have learned that photometric observations must be conducted using “normal” telescopes to be the most accurate. Now, this is what I found out about photometry: it is is a technique used by astronomers to measure the intensity of an object’s electromagnetic radiation. And since Cepheids are incredibly bright stars, photometry works very well to measure their radiation.

The authors made observations based on many of these stars and showed their findings in a series of confusing graphs depicting light and color curves for the thirty-three Cepheids. They told other scientists to make sure the measurement errors were close to 0.01 (pretty close if you ask me!) to give them more creditability. In normal human terms, the scientists constructed reliable curves of what the light was doing and improved the components of the light variations for the Cepheids. The data they collected allows them to posses the correct number of distance indicators needed for studying the inner Galactic arms to be increased by 10%, which is HUGE when you are talking about distances in the galaxy.

New knowledge is constantly being discovered in science and all of the ‘what if’ questions get me thinking about how many things can still be learned. I hope this article about the Milky Way and these new Cepheid stars will inspire girls and students everywhere to appreciate the remarkable galaxy we live in and push themselves to learn more! Because, much like the universe, the quest for knowledge, like constant need to shop, is never-ending!