When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Measuring truly astronomical distances is a challenging task, but it can be accomplished by ...

For the calibration of relatively short distances the team observed Cepheid variables. These are pulsating stars which fade and brighten at rates that are proportional to their true brightness and ...

In around 5 billion years, the sun will run out of the fuel needed for nuclear fusion in its core. This will cause its inner core to collapse under the force of the sun's own gravity. At this point, ...

The universe is expanding; we’ve had evidence of that for about a century. But just how quickly celestial objects are receding from each other is still up for debate. It’s no small feat to measure the ...

The cosmic distance ladder could soon have another rung. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. In around 5 billion years, the sun will ...

An image of the Cepheid variable star RS Puppis. The most accurate observation to date of distant stars that periodically change in brightness may spark a rethink of the rate at which the universe ...

An artist's conception of what's called the cosmic distance ladder -- a series of celestial objects, including type Ia supernovae that have known distances and can be used to calculate the rate at ...

ONE of the most basic facts about the universe is that it is expanding. This observation, made by Edwin Hubble (pictured) in 1929, leads to all sorts of mind-stretching ideas. That the universe is ...

A long-running dispute about how fast our universe is expanding just became even more entrenched. New and more precise measurements of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the ...

In 1915, Einstein's theory of General Relativity gave us a brand new theory of gravity, based on the geometrical concept of curved spacetime. Matter and energy told space how to curve; curved space ...

On December 3, humanity suddenly had information at its fingertips that people have wanted for, well, forever: the precise distances to the stars. “You type in the name of a star or its position, and ...