Astronomers have turned up the first direct proof that “standard candles” used to illuminate the size of the universe, termed Cepheids, shrink in mass, making them not quite as standard as once ...

A team of researchers at the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (IPMU) led by Robert Quimby has identified what may prove to be the first ever type Ia supernova (SNIa) ...

One of the most difficult aspects of astronomy is distance. Even the Earth’s Moon is 380,000 kilometers away, a four-day trip by rocket, and that’s the closest object in the Universe to us! Remote ...

Last week we talked about employing “Standard Candles” as a method for measuring cosmic distances. A Standard Candle is an object whose true brightness of luminosity is known. If you compare a ...

One of the more recent finding of astronomy is that stars, as far apart as they are, really like to form pairs. These so-called "binary star systems" are everywhere, and as new evidence comes in we're ...

Lots of things out in the universe can cause a supernova, from the gravitational collapse of a massive star, to the collision of white dwarfs. But most of the supernovae we observe are in other ...

In cosmology, a special type of supernovae, known as a standard candle, is used to help determine distances on cosmological length scales. These standard candles were what revealed that the expansion ...

One of the trickiest problems in astronomy is the measure of distance. In theory, distance should be simple to work out. If you know the intrinsic brightness of an object, a simple measure of its ...

Just as a candle appears dimmer the further away it is, the consistent brightness of certain celestial objects can be used to measure distance to around 11 billion light years. These so-called ...

Your birthday cake isn’t the only thing studded with lights. If you see a faint light in the distance, it might be truly dim, or it might be quite bright but very far away. If you had some way of ...

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One of the more recent finding of astronomy is that stars, as far apart as they are, really like to form pairs. These so-called "binary star systems" are everywhere, and as new evidence comes in we're ...