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We may need to check our assumptions about how the Milky Way looks to an outsider. While the typical artist’s image of our galaxy suggests a barred spiral with long, graceful arms, the challenge is we made these interpretations from data collected from within the galaxy, which provides a poor view of its outer reaches. … Read more
Roughly 13.8 billion years ago, our Universe was born in a massive explosion that gave rise to the first subatomic particles and the laws of physics as we know them. About 370,000 years later, hydrogen had formed, the building block of stars, which fuse hydrogen and helium in their interiors to create all the heavier … Read more
From Earth’s vantage point in one of the Milky Way’s spiral arms, the structure of our galaxy is pretty difficult to reconstruct. That’s because gauging the distance to something in space when you don’t know its intrinsic brightness is really, really hard. And there are a lot of objects in the Milky Way whose brightness … Read more
By Thomas Lewton A galaxy passes through other galaxies in a group known as Stephan’s quintet X-ray (NASA/CXC/CfA/E.O’Sullivan); Optical (Canada-France-Hawaii-Telescope/Coelum) HUMANS have always been captivated by the Milky Way. To the ancient Greeks, it was a squirt of breast milk, while the Mayan farmers of Mesoamerica saw it as a growing maize stalk. Today, astronomers … Read more
In the heart of the Milky Way, stars tread a complex measure. Bound by the gravitational field of the supermassive black hole in the galactic center, Sagittarius A*, a group of stars known as S-stars swoop on wild, years-long orbits. These orbits were recently studied to measure Sgr A*, a result that won the scientists … Read more
Astronomers have captured the deepest and sharpest images of the Milky Way’s center ever, enabling scientists to estimate the mass of the giant black hole at our galaxy’s heart with unmatched precision. The Milky Way observations, made with the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile, also revealed a … Read more
The supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy periodically “burps” a “mini-jet” out into space. The Milky Way‘s supermassive black hole, known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), is over 4 million times more massive than our sun. Its strong gravitational pull draws nearby stars and gas clouds into its accretion disk. … Read more