“Space is big,” wrote Douglas Adams, and he wasn’t kidding. Familiar units of distance, like miles and kilometers, quickly become too unwieldy to use in cosmic discussions. After all, we don’t say the ...

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope spotted a blazing heat from a bright, lonely spiral galaxy called UGC 9391. But even though it lacks a companion, it serves as a guiding light for every astronomer who is ...

Radio astronomers have directly measured the distance to a faraway galaxy, providing a valuable “yardstick” for calibrating large astronomical distances and demonstrating a vital method that could ...

Astronomical distances are best measured by trigonometric parallax — using the annual shift in star position caused by Earth's motion around the Sun to derive distance. Now James Miller-Jones of the ...

Radio astronomers have directly measured the distance to a faraway galaxy, providing a valuable "yardstick" for calibrating large astronomical distances and demonstrating a vital method that could ...