It's hard to really understand the large-scale structure of the Milky Way. Now, astronomers have peered towards the center of the galaxy using the ESA's X-ray telescope XMM-Newton, and discovered two colossal "chimneys" pumping huge amounts of energy and gas out into intergalactic space.
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To look through space is to look through time. Astronomers on a 5-years survey have turned up 100 supermassive black holes from a time when they were thought to be rare, suggesting we might need to rewrite our understanding of their evolution.
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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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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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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 CHIME telescope has picked up 13 unexplained radio signals coming from beyond the Milky Way. These fast radio bursts are part of one of the strangest mysteries of modern astronomy, but the new detections could help unlock their source, thanks to a rare one that seems to be repeating.
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The galaxy W2246-0526 sits 12.4 billion light-years from Earth – almost the entire radius of the observable universe – and is the most luminous galaxy ever discovered, with the brightness of 350 trillion Suns. Now, astronomers have found that W2246-0526 is cannibalizing three neighboring galaxies.
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Galaxies smash into each other on a pretty regular basis, usually merging together. Using data and observations from Hubble and the Keck Observatory, astronomers have now imaged the late stages of this incredibly slow process for the first time.
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Discoveries that back up Einstein’s theory of general relativity are still being made. The latest comes from the Max Planck Institute, where astronomers have watched how the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way pulls and stretches the light from a star as it makes its closest pass.
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Astronomers have detected some strange objects at the center of the Milky Way. They look like ordinary clouds of gas, but seem to have a solid core that keeps them together. The truth may lie somewhere in-between. These G-objects, as they’re known, seem to be stars hiding under puffy shrouds of dust
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