Caption At the center of these side-by-side images is a special class of star used as a milepost marker for measuring the universe’s rate of expansion – a Cepheid variable star. The two images ...

Astronomers from the University of Warsaw, Poland and elsewhere have detected a new classical Cepheid variable star. The newfound star, which received designation OGLE-GD-CEP-1884, has the longest ...

A decade of observations by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has produced the sharpest and most detailed images of the Andromeda galaxy. Zoom in and explore.

This marks the first time a Cepheid variable—a strange, pulsating type of star that includes Polaris—has been observed up close.

The Cepheid variable star V1 is indicated with an arrow, and four inset images show the star’s variable brightness over several weeks. It helped determine that Andromeda was another galaxy ...

Using ESA's XMM-Newton spacecraft, astronomers have conducted X-ray observations of a peculiar Cepheid variable star known as V473 Lyr. Results of the study suggest that this star has a young, low ...

Related Stories Polaris is classified as a Cepheid variable, a type of star that astronomers use as a "standard candle" to measure cosmic distances. The pulsation period of these stars is directly ...

A single Cepheid variable star in the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) proved to be the key that helped Edwin Hubble unlock the true scale of our universe.

It contains a Cepheid variable star pulsating every 3.8 days. The other star is slightly bigger and cooler, and the two stars orbit each other in 310 days.

The Harvard astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt had pioneered the use of Cepheid variable stars to measure distances, and using her method Shapley had calculated that the Milky Way was 300,000 light ...

Astronomers use Cepheid variables as "standard candles" to estimate distances for faraway objects. This helps scientists measure the expansion of the universe or Hubble constant. We have a few ...

In 1903, she was tasked with searching for Cepheid variable stars, or stars that consistently change brightness. By 1908, she had cataloged 1777 variable stars, and had made the discovery of a ...