Milky

On average, how many stars are formed each year in the Milky Way? Doug Kaupa  Council Bluffs, Iowa  There are many ways to estimate the star-formation rate of the Milky Way, ranging from counting young stars directly to measuring…

One of the biggest questions facing astronomers today concerns star formation and its role in the evolution of galaxies. In particular, astronomers are curious whether the process began in the central regions of galaxies, where stars…

For centuries, sailors have told tales of nights when, for a few surreal hours or more, their ships would come across seas that glow the color of milk. The eerie phenomenon appeared “like a plain covered with snow,” reported the captain…

A team of astronomers have used the ALMA telescope to find a slowly-rotating galaxy in the early Universe. That galaxy is the youngest ever found with a measured rotation, and it's much slower than present-day galaxies.  All galaxies…

A recently discovered star, now designated S4716, is traveling at the mind-boggling speed of 5,000 miles (8,000 km) per second around the black hole at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, Space.com reported. The vast expanse of our…

There’s a population of stars in the heart of our galaxy whipping around Sagittarius A* (the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole). Astronomers just found the closest, fastest one (so far). It’s called S4716 and it orbits Sag A*…

The thing with black holes is they’re hard to see. Typically we can only detect their presence when we can detect their gravitational pull. And if there are rogue black holes simply traveling throughout the galaxy and not tied to…

Astronomers are a step closer to revealing the properties of dark matter enveloping our Milky Way galaxy, thanks to a new map of 12 streams of stars orbiting within our galactic halo.…

The star HD 222925 is a ninth-magnitude star located toward the southern constellation Tucana. Credit: The STScI Digitized Sky SurveyIn our sun’s cosmic neighborhood of the <span class="glossaryLink"…

The central region of the giant elliptical galaxy NGC 474. It’s set against a backdrop of more distant galaxies. Will the Milky Way resemble this galaxy in the distant future? This image was taken using the Hubble Advanced Camera for…