The Milky Way (and Earth) as seen from the International Space Station. Soichi Noguchi Astronaut Soichi Noguchi has posted a beautiful shot of the Milky Way from his unique vantage point on the International Space Station (ISS). The stunning photo also offers a glimpse of Earth about 250 miles below the orbiting outpost. The Japanese […]
Rendering of a star called S0-2 orbiting the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. It did not fall in, but its close approach could be one reason for the black hole’s growing appetite. Artist’s rendering by Nicolle Fuller/National Science Foundation Last month, we learned that the supermassive black hole at the […]
[embedded content] Astronomers have created a 3D map of our entire galaxy by pinpointing stars called Cepheids which pulsate and can be used to track distance and changes in space. Cepheids are young stars less than 400 million years old and their brightness varies over periods of between one and one hundred days. The astronomers […]
Left to right: the Large Magellanic Cloud, the Milky Way Galaxy, and Antlia 2. V. Belokurov / Marcus and Gail Davies / Robert Gendler. New research suggests that hundreds of millions of years ago the Milky Way collided with Antlia 2, a nearby dwarf galaxy. This collision caused ripples in the edge of the disk […]
Artist’s impression of a ring of cool, interstellar gas surrounding the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. New ALMA observations reveal this structure for the first time. NRAO/AUI/NSF; S. Dagnello At the center of our galaxy, approximately 26,000 light-years away, is a supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A* (pronounced A Star). […]
Messier 62, a globular cluster imaged by Hubble. The view shows ultraviolet and visible light gathered by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. ESA/Hubble & NASA, S. Anderson et al. This week’s Hubble Picture of the Week is a view of the stunning and unusual Messier 62 cluster in the constellation of […]
The Milky Way is under threat: new research from astrophysicists at Durham University, UK, suggests that the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) will dramatically collide with our galaxy in two billion years’ time. It was previously predicted that the Milky Way would collide with the nearby galaxy of Andromeda in between four billion and eight billion […]