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 ...

Without fanfare, astronomers have redefined one of the most important distances in the Solar System. The astronomical unit (au) — the rough distance from the Earth to the Sun — has been transformed ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...