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 ...

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

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.

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 ...

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 ...

Space. It's really, really big. How big is it? Well, according to astronomers, the observable universe is around 92 billion light-years in diameter, but that's all we can see (hence the word ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...