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 ...

One of the questions I am sometimes asked is, "How do astronomers know how far away a star or a distant galaxy happens to be from Earth?" In our sky this week, there are three stars that have been ...

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 ...

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 ...

Researchers measure star-forming region beyond Miky Way's centre. Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF; Robert Hurt, NASA. After an unprecedented observation, astronomers have directly measured the distance from ...

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 ...