Let’s try a demonstration that we all enjoyed in elementary school. Close one eye, hold out your thumb at arm’s length, and align it with an object on the other side of the room. Without moving your ...

A team of astronomers has used asteroseismology, or the study of stellar oscillations, to accurately measure the distance of stars from the Earth. Their research examined thousands of stars and ...

Don't miss the big stories. Like us on Facebook. Astronomers quickly become used to dealing with huge numbers. For example, in any one lecture, I might declare that the sun emits some 400 billion ...

A reader from Jackson, Mo., asks, "How do astronomers know the distances to the various objects they talk about?" The answer is that astronomers use a "boot strap" process to determine distances over ...

It’s a bit mind-bending to realise that everything we know about the scale of the universe comes from people stuck […] ...

For most of us, the countless bright spots in the nighttime sky all seem to be stars. But in fact, some of those spots are actually planets, or distant suns, or even entire galaxies located billions ...