Tagged: Milky Way

  The Milky Way’s thick disk is 2 billion years older than astronomers previously thought and likely formed barely 800 million years after the Big Bang, a new study based on an unusual type of star found. Our galaxy can be split into two major...

New data from the star-mapping Gaia satellite are helping scientists unlock the mystery of our Milky Way galaxy’s spiral arms. Recently published studies exploring the Early Data Release 3 (EDR3), a batch of observations made available to the scientific community last December, reveal the spiral...

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. David Yong, Academic, Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Australian National University Gary Da Costa, Emeritus Professor of Astronomy, Australian National University Until recently it...

Have you ever looked up from a dark place on a starry July or August evening and noticed the dark areas in the Milky Way? For centuries, skywatchers pondered this Great Rift or Dark Rift, as it’s called, but today’s astronomers know it consists of...

Omega Centauri, the largest globular star cluster of the Milky Way, contains about 10 million stars. This behemoth, with a diameter of 230 light-years, is 10 times more massive than a typical globular cluster. Despite all these stars, scientists released a study in 2018 that...

  A century-old celestial mystery is one step closer to being solved as researchers discover a dozen ultra-powerful natural particle accelerators in our galaxy. The findings help astronomers understand the origin of cosmic rays — charged particles and atomic nuclei flying through space at near...

  It’s always a good sign when astronomers are blunt about how observations have puzzled them. One such confusing object, discovered by a project called the VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea survey, or VVV, appears to be just the second of its kind known...

A new cosmic map revealed hidden structures connecting galaxies, which could help scientists model a future collision between the Milky Way and Andromeda, our galaxy’s nearest neighbor. The map, made with machine learning, may also shed more light on dark matter’s influence in the evolution...

Scientists have found evidence of a rare, gargantuan stellar explosion, dating to the earliest days of the universe — less than a billion years after the Big Bang. Known as a “magneto-rotational hypernova,” this ancient explosion would have been roughly 10 times brighter and more...

The supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, Sagittarius A*, is by far the closest such object to us, about 27,000 light-years away. Although it is not nearly so active or luminous as other galactic nuclei with supermassive black holes, its...