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Henrietta Leavitt discovered a relation between luminosity and period of variable stars, so it was possible to measure distance between two variable stars. I am curious to know how that was important back in time. How is the luminosity-period relation applied to measure distance? Was this method important because they finally had trusted apparent/absolute magnitude values to apply to the distance modulus equation?

HDE 226868
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scapegoat
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    Duplicate of and related to: http://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/3685/distance-of-extra-galactic-classical-cepheids; http://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/932/how-can-we-be-sure-that-we-have-identified-very-distant-stars-correctly/940#940; http://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/8037/determining-distances-in-space/8038#8038; http://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/1177/how-do-we-know-that-the-intrinsic-brightness-of-cepheid-variables-corresponds-to. – Py-ser Mar 05 '15 at 09:20
  • the first link is kind of what I wanted, but I would like to know more about the equations. And I still miss the last part of the question: luminosity-period and the distance modulus equation, how are they related? – scapegoat Mar 05 '15 at 14:58
  • Please, be more specific and edit your question if some of the links do not answer your (not yet formulated) question. – Py-ser Mar 07 '15 at 10:13

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