How far away are the most distant objects in the Universe? How has the Universe expanded over the course of its history? And therefore, how big and how old is the Universe since the Big Bang? Through ...

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 ...

Social insects, which don’t have very large nervous systems, are capable of remarkably sophisticated behavior, such as the direction-giving dance by bees or the lifesaving rafts formed by fire ants.

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Measuring truly astronomical distances is a challenging task, but it can be accomplished by ...

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 ...

University of Newcastle provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU. Let’s talk numbers for a moment. The moon is approximately 384,000 kilometres away, and the sun is approximately 150 ...

A long-running dispute about how fast our universe is expanding just became even more entrenched. New and more precise measurements of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the ...

Taking advantage of the presence of light echoes, a team of astronomers have used an ESO telescope to measure, at the 1 percent precision level, the distance of a Cepheid -- a class of variable stars ...

Astronomical units (AU), defined by the Sun-Earth distance, are used for measuring distances within solar systems. Light-years, representing the distance light travels in a year (approximately 6 ...