For reference, Pluto’s average distance from the Sun is about 40 AU, so 2023 KQ14 is quite distant. At 23.4 billion miles (37 ...

The mission is to use the transit—one of astronomy's rarest predictable events—to measure the size of the astronomical unit (au), the average distance from the Earth to the sun. It's the unit ...

Some of that seems to be related to a general lack of familiarity with what an astronomical unit actually is (it's the distance from Earth to the sun, for the record), but there's also the fact ...

But thanks to a unanimous vote at the International Astronomical Union’s meeting in Beijing, China, the astronomical unit is now one single, tidy number.

On Monday, Nov. 11, 20199, Mercury will appear to pass across the disk of the sun as seen from Earth. This event — which astronomers call a transit — helped early astronomers measure distances ...

The astronomical unit (au) — the rough distance from the Earth to the Sun — has been transformed from a confusing calculation into a single number.

Next time a 5-year-old asks you how far the sun is, know you have the unanimous support of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in answering clearly and confidently: 149,597,870,700 meters ...