Yardsticks are very useful around the house when you need a measurement. (I have also used them to fish out toys the cat knocked under a low piece of furniture.) They are standards by which we can ...

Spring is galaxy season. If you have a small telescope, this is a good time of year to get it out to find galaxies in the sky. Because most will appear as dim fuzzy blobs, a detailed star chart is ...

Researchers using the testbed interferometer at Palomar Observatory have achieved the best-ever distance measurement to a type of star known as a Cepheid variable. The new results improve the "cosmic ...

In 1925, Edwin Hubble's observation of Cepheid variables in the Andromeda galaxy revolutionized astronomy, proving the existence of galaxies beyond the Milky Way. This discovery, aided by telescopes ...

Kochanek, Stanek, Prieto / Ohio State U. The galaxy M81, seen here in an image from the Large Binocular Telescope, is home to several ultra-long-period Cepheid variable stars that could help ...

CEPHEID (variable stars—the name given to stars which behave like δ Cephei—have played a distinguished part in modern astronomy. Their most characteristic feature—that there is a definite relation ...

A persistent, nagging problem with the expansion speed of the Universe may not require a rewrite of everything we know about physics. New measurements taken using the James Webb Space Telescope ...

THE most important objection raised against the pulsation theory of Cepheid variation lies in its failure to explain the observed phase relation between temperature and radial velocity. In a pulsating ...