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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The Universe is expanding, and every scientist in the field agrees with that. The observations overwhelmingly support that straightforward conclusion, and every alternative has failed to match its ...

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 ...

The question of how fast the universe is expanding just keeps getting more confusing. Our two main methods of measuring the acceleration of the universe’s expansion disagree by nine per cent.