Answer: For near stars, astronomers use a method called parallax. During Earth’s orbit, near stars seem to shift their position against the farther stars. This is called parallax shift. By ...

Scientists using the James Webb and Hubble space telescopes have confirmed one of the biggest head-scratchers in modern ...

At the Harvard College Observatory in years around 1900, women were hired to make measurements of astronomical data and do ...

She was particularly interested in Cepheid variables, which are stars whose brightness pulses regularly, so they get brighter and dimmer with a particular period. She found a relationship between ...

It turned out to be a Cepheid, a special kind of star that brightens and dims periodically, and which can be used to measure distances in space. Hubble, after years, realised that the nebula was ...

When we gaze up at the night sky, it’s hard not to wonder about the vastness of the universe and its origins. The universe, ...

The star that Hubble had discovered, V1, was in fact a special class of pulsating star. It was a Cepheid variable that can be used to measure large cosmic distances reliably. Hubble’s ...

The HST Key Project team measured the distances to 24 different galaxies using Cepheid variable stars—stars that brighten and dim periodically and are 500–30,000 times brighter than the sun. “When the ...