Imagine trying to reconstruct the history of a city by studying only its oldest surviving buildings. You can't watch it being built, you can't interview the architects, all you have are the structures ...

Astronomers used RR Lyrae stars to trace the early Milky Way, revealing a rapid formation of its halo and disk, with chemical patterns similar to Andromeda.

Many, perhaps most, stars in the universe live their lives with companions by their sides — in so-called binary systems. Until recently, however, the ancient RR Lyrae stars appeared, for mysterious ...

Earth is fortunate to be orbiting a star that is fairly constant in its light production. The amount of light energy reaching Earth from the Sun has varied by much less than 1 percent over the past ...

POTSDAM, Germany, April 22 (UPI) --The Milky Way hosts several generations of stars. Finding the really old ones -- the stars that witnessed the birth and early evolution of the galaxy -- isn't easy.

Astronomers have discovered more than 200 distant variable stars known as RR Lyrae stars in the Milky Way's stellar halo. The most distant of these stars is more than a million light years from Earth, ...

A team led by Andrea Kunder from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) measured the velocity of a sample of 100 old RR Lyrae stars* thought to reside in the galactic bulge, the central ...

SANTIAGO, Chile, Oct. 12 (UPI) --With the help of the European Southern Observatory's infrared VISTA telescope, astronomers have discovered a cluster of ancient stars at the center of the Milky Way.

Ancient stars, of a type known as RR Lyrae, have been discovered in the centre of the Milky Way for the first time, using ESO’s infrared VISTA telescope. RR Lyrae stars typically reside in ancient ...