Abstract
A method is described whereby the radius of any pulsating star can be obtained by applying the Principle of Maximum Likelihood. The relative merits of this method and of the usual Baade–Wesselink method are discussed in an Appendix. The new method is applied to 54 well-observed cepheids which include a number of spectroscopic binaries and two W Vir stars. An empirical period–radius relation is constructed and discussed in terms of two recent period–luminosity–colour calibrations. It is shown that the new method gives radii with an error of no more than 10 per cent.

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