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 ...

How is astronomical distance determined? Just cannot get my head around cepheid variables, parallax, etc. How is it possible to tell how far away something is when you cannot bounce a radar beam off ...

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 ...

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 ...

In 1925, Edwin Hubble's observation of Cepheid variables in the Andromeda galaxy revolutionized astronomy, proving the existence of galaxies beyond the Milky Way. This discovery, aided by telescopes ...

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 ...

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 ...

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has been trained on a single variable star that in 1923 altered the course of modern astronomy. V1 is a special class of pulsating star called a Cepheid variable that can ...

“By using the HARPS instrument on the 3.6-meter telescope at the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) La Silla Observatory in Chile, along with other telescopes, we have measured the mass of a ...