The universe is a big place, and it’s hard to fathom the immense size given our finite ideas of distance here on Earth. Because of this, determining an answer for exactly “how big” is difficult.

Across the galaxy, astronomers now see that planetary systems fall into four broad classes, and our own solar system, part of the rare Ordered group, is only one of them. At the same time, discoveries ...

It’s always amazing, and more than a little humbling, when the universe reminds us that our “common sense” is provincial, ...

James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...

In the history of this humble little star-watching column, I've thrown a myriad of numbers at you about the sizes of the stars and planets visible in our night sky and the tremendous distances between ...

The 1920 Shapley-Curtis debate concerned the scale of the universe, with Curtis correctly proposing a universe composed of many galaxies ("island universes"), while Shapley correctly posited the Sun's ...

I’m getting email and tweets about a Flash-based interactive tool where you can zoom in and out on the Universe, getting a scale of things from the tiniest fluctuations in the quantum foam of space to ...

Look up on a dark night and the stars seem scattered at random. Step back in scale, though, and the Universe looks nothing ...

Here’s How Big Our Cities Really Are. Los Angeles seems like a relatively big town. In fact, it is the second largest city in the United States. The area spans 502 square miles (1,300 sq km), and some ...

As evidenced by the diagrams that make up the Tree of Knowledge System, I think it is valuable that we teach individuals broad frames to think about the Universe and our place in it. That was why I ...

Mikhail Ivanov, Oliver Philcox, and Marko Simonović won the New Horizons Award for their work on large scale structures — the strands and filaments of our universe which contain buried clues to its ...