Home, wherever you live on planet Earth, is tucked into a scattering of stars called the Orion Spur, which slips between the arms of our Milky Way galaxy like a mistake between a cookie's cinnamon ...

In 1838, Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel won the race to measure the first distance to a star other than our Sun via the trigonometric parallax—setting the first scale of the universe. Astronomers from the U ...

We cannot see the Milky Way like we do other galaxies, and that’s because we live inside of it. Although we can peer along its edge while embedded in its disk, we cannot see what it looks like face-on ...

Astronomers have succeeded in precisely determining the astronomical yardstick for the Galaxy based upon precise distance measurements from advanced radio telescopes. The new findings are that the ...

After the work of Kepler and Galileo in the first decade of the 17^th century it was apparent that foreground stars should shift position relative to background stars when viewed from our orbiting ...

Cambridge, MA – The Perseus spiral arm – the nearest spiral arm in the Milky Way outside the Sun’s orbit – lies only half as far from Earth as some previous studies had suggested. An international ...

Distance measured out to the far side of our Milky Way means that radio astronomers now can work on producing an accurate map of the full extent of our galaxy's structure for the first time.

The most accurate catalogue of the distances to more than 100,000 stars has just been released. Cambridge astronomer Dr Floor van Leeuwen has spent the past 10 years checking and recalculating data ...

Astronomers have identified 20 new stellar systems in our local solar neighborhood, including the twenty-third and twenty-fourth closest stars to the Sun. When added to eight other systems announced ...

Good news, everyone! We’re not intergalactic hicks after all! Turns out that our solar system is located in a large spiral branch called the Local Arm, a prominent feature of the Milky Way galaxy. Top ...

Astronomers directly measured the distance to a region on the far side of our Milky Way Galaxy, past the Galaxy's center. Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF; Robert Hurt, NASA Using a 180-year-old technique ...