standard candle
Britishnoun
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Wendy Freedman, an astronomer at the University of Chicago, uses a certain class of red giant stars as her preferred standard candle.
From Scientific American ● Jan. 25, 2022
The maps provided not a standard candle, but a standard yardstick: a pattern of hotter and colder spots in the primordial soup created by sound waves rippling through the newborn universe.
From Science Magazine ● Mar. 8, 2017
Astronomy's most reliable light bulb, or, to use the preferred and quainter term, standard candle, is a type of star called a Cepheid variable, whose inherent brightness can be easily calculated.
From Time Magazine Archive
To test the distance of the spiral nebulae, a class of intrinsically much brighter variable stars was needed to furnish a new standard candle.
From "Cosmos" by Carl Sagan
Perhaps a quasar standard candle will be found, and the distances to the quasars determined independent of their red shifts.
From "Cosmos" by Carl Sagan
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
