SIMULATING MEASURINGS OF DISTANCES TO STARS IN LABORATORY

Abstract

One of the most common curiosities of the students when it comes to astronomy is to understand how astronomical distances are determined. The reason is that in their daily lives, distances are usually measured with instruments such as rulers, tape, etc. The most common method for measuring astronomical distances is based on parallax, however, the latter is used to measure distances to stars which are relatively close to the earth. For distant stars, another method for calculating distance consists in using the apparent luminous flux of an object that has its intrinsic luminosity known, called the standard candle. In this article, we present the results of a laboratory experiment about those methods, using a protractor (for parallax distance) and the measurement of the luminous flux of a lamp. We were able to measure the parallax distance with a relative percentage deviation of 0.95%, while the luminosity distance was determined with a relative percentage deviation of 7.67%.