Milky

WASHINGTON (AP) — The world got a look Thursday at the first wild but fuzzy image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy, with astronomers calling it a “gentle giant” on a near-starvation diet.…

What’s going on with our galaxy?Astronomers have long suspected that 26,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius, lurking behind the clouds of dust and gas that shroud the center of the Milky Way, there is a massive black…

In the past century, astronomers have learned a great deal about the cosmos and our place in it. From discovering that the Universe is in a constant state of expansion to the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and the…

This image from NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer shows NGC 6744, one of the galaxies most similar to our Milky Way. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech) A look up at the…

What happens when the universe gets indigestion? Massive bubbles form at the middle of the Milky Way, and then astronomers and scientists get to debate what it all means. They've been doing exactly that when, in 2020, the X-ray…

The Universe is full of astronomical wonders, but it’s up to humanity to observe and analyze them.The Large (top right) and Small (lower left) Magellanic Clouds are visible in the southern skies, and helped guide Magellan on his famous…

Using data from ESA’s Gaia spacecraft, astronomers have looked for the remains of ancient dwarf galaxies in the Milky Way’s halo, which surrounds the disk of younger stars and central bulge of older stars that comprise the more…

The dark filament “Nessie,” as seen in the infrared with the IRAC camera on Spitzer. Nessie, a cloud of cold gas and dust, is a “bone” tracing the Milky Way’s spiral arm structure. Astronomers have used SOFIA, NASA’s Stratospheric…

A mosaic image of the center of the Milky Way, captured with radiowaves. The magnetic filaments are large, vertical slashes throughout the image. Credit: Northwestern University ‘A watershed in furthering our understanding of these…

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…