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 ...

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 trillion watts of power each second, that our Milky ...

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 ...

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 ...

Astronomers have found a clever new way to slice and dice the flickering light from a distant star in a way that reveals the strength of gravity at its surface. That is important because a star’s ...

This all-sky view of the entire Milky Way (as seen from both the northern and southern hemispheres) is not a photograph but a map based on individual measurements for nearly 1.7 billion stars. The ...

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 ...

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 ...