Over the 25 years I’ve written this column, I’ve often marveled at the mind-boggling distances to many celestial objects. Astronomers don’t often use miles to express stellar and galactic distances ...

It isn't easy to measure the distance of stars. We can't travel to them, counting the miles as we go, nor can we simply say that brighter stars are closer and dimmer ones more distant. Instead, we ...

In the nearly 20 years that I’ve enjoyed sharing my love of astronomy with you, I’ve rattled off many, many distances to many stars and galaxies. If we tried to express the distances in miles, the ...

Whether reading science news or watching science fiction, one hears references to distances between objects and places in space. Distances between stars is one thing, but the great gulfs between the ...

One of the questions I am sometimes asked is, "How do astronomers know how far away a star or a distant galaxy happens to be from Earth?" In our sky this week, there are three stars that have been ...

If you enjoyed this article, I’d like to ask for your support. Scientific American has served as an advocate for science and industry for 180 years, and right now may be the most critical moment in ...

THE determination of stellar distances is fundamental to the investigation of the sidereal universe. When once the distance of a star is known, we can calculate its transverse speed in kilometres a ...