A team of astronomers has managed to find the origin of an enormous star that is currently barreling out of the Milky Way having escaped from one of our galaxy’s spiral arms. The discovery challenges the theory that such stars come from the galactic center.
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How heavy is the Milky Way galaxy? A team of astronomers has used data from Hubble and the Gaia satellite to make the most accurate measurement of the mass of the galaxy by studying the motions of star clusters orbiting the Milky Way.
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Black holes tend to fall into two categories: fairly small or supermassive. It’s long been believed that there should be a middle class, and in recent years astronomers have found evidence of these “intermediate mass” black holes. Now a Japanese team has located one near the center of the Milky Way.
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NASA has selected the newest space mission for its Explorer program: the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx). The spacecraft will search for the ingredients of life in the Milky Way, and peer as far as 10 billion years back in time.
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Conventional wisdom has long held that the Milky Way was a flat disk of stars and gas, with a bulge in the middle. But now astronomers have created a more accurate 3D map of the galaxy and found that it’s more warped and twisted than previously thought.
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Astronomers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) have re-processed an old Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (HUDF) image to find new details. The end result is the deepest image ever taken of the universe from space.
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A team of astronomers has used a global array of telescopes to peer through the fog and capture some of the clearest radio images yet of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. And it may indicate that the object just happens to be pointing directly at Earth.
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The Sun is a mere 10-watt bulb compared to quasars, extremely luminous galactic cores that shine so intensely thanks to their ravenous hunger for nearby material. Now, astronomers have detected the brightest quasar ever found, shining with the light of almost 600 trillion Suns.
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Astronomers have pieced together a massive mosaic of the nearby Triangulum Galaxy from images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The Vast spiral galaxy is located just three million light-years from Earth, and can be seen by the naked eye on a clear night in a dark sky area.
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According to a new study, the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby dwarf galaxy, is on a collision course with the Milky Way. But there’s no need to worry just yet – the starry smashup won’t begin for another two billion years or so.
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