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 ...

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 ...

The new results, from a team led by Grzegorz Pietrzyński (Universidad de Concepción, Chile, Obserwatorium Astronomiczne Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, Poland), appear in the Nov. 25, 2010 edition of the ...

The size and age of our Universe is not only a critically important issue in cosmology, but is also among the most controversial and delicate of the cosmological questions. Infrared observations made ...

Yardsticks are very useful around the house when you need a measurement. (I have also used them to fish out toys the cat knocked under a low piece of furniture.) They are standards by which we can ...

This excess emission could affect the distance measurement of Cepheids in infrared radiation, introducing uncertainties of several percent — unless we estimate correctly the amount of material ...

Since the 1960s, a class of special pulsating stars has stymied scientists attempting to weigh them. The two main ideas for how to measure these stars' masses have so far produced vastly different ...

Physicists have improved the accuracy of a technique that uses variable stars to measure distances in the universe, providing a new figure for its expansion rate. When you purchase through links on ...