Cepheid variable star
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How Far Away are Galaxies?
Well, I’ll give you a spoiler: they’re ridiculously far away. Let’s consider for a moment what a light-year actually means. It sounds like a unit of time, but it’s actually the distance that light travels in one Earth year. Think…
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A Universe of Galaxies
When the earliest astronomers and philosophers looked up at the night sky, they never could have imagined a sight like this. What if I told you there are only four single stars in this image? That’s right. Four. The rest…
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The Milky Way Demystified
Alright, people…time to finish off our exploration of the Milky Way Galaxy, our home in the cosmos! For the past nine weeks, we’ve covered everything from how our galaxy was “discovered” to how it may have formed. But there’s so…
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How Big is the Milky Way?
How big is our galaxy, anyway? And more than that — how do we know? Consider that we can’t really take a photo like this of our galaxy. We’re inside it, and space travel has not advanced to the point…
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What are Variable Stars?
What if I told you that the “two” stars you see here are actually one and the same? This star, known as L Carinae after its location in the southern constellation Carina, is actually what we call a variable star.…
