distance scale, as well as to research the stellar life-cycle. relationship to distance. A 100-watt light bulb one mile away looks exactly as bright as a 25-watt light bulb half a mile away. So to ...

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 ...

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 ...

The NASA-led Swift mission has measured the distance to two gamma-ray bursts — back to back, from opposite parts of the sky — and both were from over nine billion light years away, unleashed billions ...

It’s a bit mind-bending to realise that everything we know about the scale of the universe comes from people stuck on a tiny rock, peering through glass at dots of light. We can’t exactly pull out a ...

Extra stellar systems are so far away from our own that we couldn’t even hope of developing a tape measure long enough to determine how far away they really are. On the other hand, astronomers can ...

Spring is galaxy season. If you have a small telescope, this is a good time of year to get it out to find galaxies in the sky. Because most will appear as dim fuzzy blobs, a detailed star chart is ...

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 ...

(Nanowerk News) 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 ...