The Cosmological Distance Ladder

A course on measuring distances to celestial objects, taught at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan during spring 2017.

Course material can be found online at

• http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/ladder/ladder.html
• https://people.rit.edu/~mwrsps/ladder/ladder.html

Outline for the course, class schedule, etc.

Lectures. The list below serves a general guide to the topics and their sequence, but is not definitive.

• Week 1, Day 1A: What is the cosmological distance ladder?
• Week 1, Day 1B: Parallax is great! Gaia will expand our view
  • An example of measuring the parallax of a star including a very detailed explanation of how, given some measurements, one can find the best-fitting parameters for a model
• Week 1, Day 2A: Using "ordinary" stars in clusters and HR diagrams
• Week 1, Day 2B: Variable stars: eclipsing binaries and pulsing stars
• Week 2, Day 3A: Nearby galaxies: HR diagrams (again), SBF, and globular clusters
• Week 2, Day 3B: More distant galaxies: geometry, T-F and fundamental plane
• Week 2, Day 4A: Methods involving supernovae
• Week 2, Day 4B: Using a special gravitational lens, and the debates over H₀

Homework sets

For more information:

There are many, many sources for information on these topics. Below are just a few that we may visit frequently during the course.

• NASA Extragalactic Database (NED)
• The Gaia Archive thanks to the ESA
• SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data Service Astronomy Query Form is a very good place to find papers on any topic.
• ArXiv's astro-ph has the very latest preprints and papers, and often has free PDFs of published papers, too.

This page maintained by Michael Richmond. Last modified May 22, 2017.