Stars and other objects beyond our solar system lie anywhere from a few light-years to a few billion light-years away. And everything astronomers "see" in the distant universe is literally history.

Auroras have intrigued humans for millennia with their wispy ribbons of light dancing across the sky ... expect incredible auroras over the next few years. The sun has been continuously gaining ...

"Beyond the Milky Way lie billions of other galaxies, drifting a few million light years from one another like lily pads floating on the surface of a pond." — Timothy Ferris in Seeing in the ...

and the large spiral galaxy is indeed 2.5 million light-years away. Once things start being a few billion light-years away, the equivalence doesn’t work anymore. Let’s take SMACS 0723 ...

Nearly 200,000 light-years from Earth ... often still interesting differences to note over the course of just a few years. Time passing also has the extra benefit that our technology on Earth ...

The scientists monitored 68 of these pulsars within a few thousand light-years of Earth. Because gravitational waves make spacetime contract and expand, they alter the spans of time between radio ...

Located about 3,000 light years from Earth ... These explosions reoccur every few years. The explosion will create a bright spot in the sky that will last about a week. The last time the star ...

and after a few months of monitoring the black hole in visible light, the TDE faded, and astronomers moved on. But AT2018hyz had a surprise in store. Nearly three years later, the black hole ...

to the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang. The stars that the telescope will reveal may actually be long-dead today, but as their ancient light makes the lengthy journey across the ...