Have you ever wondered how astronomers measure the distance to other objects in the universe? How do they make claims that this nebula is 1,500 light years distance or that galaxy is 2.5 million light ...

Cambridge, MA – The Perseus spiral arm – the nearest spiral arm in the Milky Way outside the Sun’s orbit – lies only half as far from Earth as some previous studies had suggested. An international ...

One of the questions I am sometimes asked is, "How do astronomers know how far away a star or a distant galaxy happens to be from Earth?" In our sky this week, there are three stars that have been ...

Over the 25 years I’ve written this column, I’ve often marveled at the mind-boggling distances to many celestial objects. Astronomers don’t often use miles to express stellar and galactic distances ...

Astronomers have succeeded in precisely determining the astronomical yardstick for the Galaxy based upon precise distance measurements from advanced radio telescopes. The new findings are that the ...

A way of estimating more accurate distances to the thousands of so-called "planetary nebulae" dispersed across our Galaxy has just been announced by a team of three astronomers based at the University ...

Astronomers directly measured the distance to a region on the far side of our Milky Way Galaxy, past the Galaxy's center. Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF; Robert Hurt, NASA Using a 180-year-old technique ...

There are many myths and legends about the Milky Way, the group of dust, gas and approximately 400 billion stars, which remain relatively close to each other by the gravitational pull in which the ...

The most accurate catalogue of the distances to more than 100,000 stars has just been released. Cambridge astronomer Dr Floor van Leeuwen has spent the past 10 years checking and recalculating data ...

Good news, everyone! We’re not intergalactic hicks after all! Turns out that our solar system is located in a large spiral branch called the Local Arm, a prominent feature of the Milky Way galaxy. Top ...