Tagged: Milky Way

Astronomers try to solve the mystery of antihelium by searching for antistars. Out of an estimated 100 billion stars in our galaxy, no more than 14 may be made from antimatter. That’s the result from a new study that scoured the Milky Way for signs...

The Milky Way’s central molecular zone (CMZ) spans the innermost 1600 light-years of the galaxy (for comparison, the Sun is 26,600 light-years away from the galactic center) and includes a vast complex of molecular clouds containing about sixty million solar-masses of molecular gas. The gas...

When most of us picture the shape of the Milky Way, the galaxy that contains our own sun and hundreds of billions of other stars, we think of a central mass surrounded by a flat disc of stars that spiral around it. However, astronomers know...

Finnish astrophotographer J-P Metsavainio spent 1,250 hours over the course of about 12 years creating a single image that reveals the magnificent beauty of the entire Milky Way galaxy. Back in 2009, Metsavainio began this project, which is a 1.7-gigapixel mosaic of the Milky Way...

The stars are turning the space between them into a field of cosmic magnifying glasses, and that’s screwing with our view of a star much farther away. Read more:In summer 2016, astronomers watched a star 2,500 light-years away in the Cygnus constellation flash to life...

Scientists studying a mysterious signal from far-off galaxies didn’t find dark matter as they’d hoped. But the inventive new technique they used to detect this strange signal, which uses our own galaxy to hunt for dark matter, could elevate the hunt for the elusive material....

A recent study went full Indiana Jones to show that our home galaxy, the Milky Way, was a cannibal in its earlier years, swallowing five smaller galaxies. Like Jones, the famed (albeit fictional) archaeologist, astrophysicist Duncan Forbes of Swinburne University in Australia used clues from...

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is further probing the remnants of a massive space explosion visible from Earth 3.5 million years ago. Embedded in the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, a supermassive black hole known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) had unleashed a massive...

Far-off alien planets covered in vast oceans might be common in our Milky Way galaxy, scientists find. “Ocean worlds” are terrestrial planets that have significant amounts of water either on their surfaces or in a subsurface sea. Right here in our own solar system, Saturn...

A strange white dwarf star hurtling through the Milky Way may be the survivor of a “partial supernova,” a new study finds. White dwarfs are the cool, dim Earth-size cores of dead stars that are left behind after average-size stars have exhausted their fuel and...