Cepheid variables are pulsating supergiant stars whose regular brightness variations are tightly correlated with their intrinsic luminosities. This period–luminosity relation, often termed the Leavitt ...

Measuring the distance to far away objects in space can be tricky. We don't even know the precise distance to even our closest neighbors in the universe—the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds. But, ...

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 ...

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 ...

All the Cepheid variables in the Magellenic Clouds were about the same distance from Earth, on an intergalactic scale, so if one looked much brighter than another, it was probably due to an actual ...

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 ...

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

This image of NGC 5468, a galaxy located about 130 million light-years from Earth, combines data from the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes. This is the farthest galaxy in which Hubble has ...