For the calibration of relatively short distances the team observed Cepheid variables. These are pulsating stars which fade and brighten at rates that are proportional to their true brightness and ...

See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. New findings into a cosmic puzzle suggest that scientists may have ...

A spectacular cosmic event nicknamed “SN Winny” could help solve one of astronomy’s biggest mysteries: how fast the universe is expanding. This rare superluminous supernova, located 10 billion ...

A difference of a few kilometers per second might not sound like much. In cosmology, it has become one of the field’s most stubborn problems. An international team of astronomers has now delivered one ...

The cosmic distance ladder is the world’s longest ruler, built to measure the universe. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, scientists have been constructing a cosmic measuring tape to measure the ...

Trying to measure the size of the universe is no easy task. We know that the universe is expanding, though the exact rate of this expansion is not yet fixed. So one method that astronomers use to tell ...

Artist’s interpretation of the cosmic distance ladder — a succession of overlapping methods used to measure distances across the Universe, where each rung of the ladder provides information that can ...