Click anywhere on this site, and you’ll likely run into a measurement in terms of light-years, solar masses, astronomical units, or arcminutes. These units are unique to astronomy, and all can be ...

Appearances aside, the stars are not eternal and the planets do not move with clockwork precision. For these reasons, one astronomer is proposing that his colleagues ditch the astronomical unit, or AU ...

The International Astronomical Union drops the mic. How far away from Earth is the sun? Not just, you know, very, very far, but in terms of an actual, measurable distance? When you're calculating, how ...

The sun still shines as bright, but according to the International Astronomical Union (IAU), its precise distance from us has just changed. At a recent meeting of the IAU in Beijing, China, members ...

Space is Big. Really Big. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy pretty much nailed space with those five words. And space is so really big that our earthly measures of distance struggle. The distance ...

One of the stalwart units of astronomy just got a makeover. The International Astronomical Union, the authority on astronomical constants, has voted unanimously to redefine the astronomical unit, the ...

Scientists still define astronomical time in years, with some recent refinements. By C. Claiborne Ray Q. Do scientists actually speak of the age of the universe in years, or do they use some ...

If you guessed the astronomical unit, you are correct. The au — the rough distance between the Earth and the Sun — was previously determined by a confusing calculation (“the radius of an unperturbed ...

"Space is Big. Really Big." The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy pretty much nailed space with those five words. And space is so really big that our earthly measures of distance struggle. The distance ...