Studying a galaxy from the inside can be a tricky thing, but astronomers have still managed to learn a great deal about our own Milky Way. One of the things scientists think they know about our galaxy — and many other galaxies like our own — is that they revolve around a black hole. In …
When you look up at the night sky you see a lot of stars that, in relation to our own planet, haven’t moved a whole lot in a very, very long time. But some of the stars in our home galaxy aren’t so lucky, and astronomers recently identified one in particular that is absolutely speeding …
We often think of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, as being a self-contained collection of stars, planets, gas and dust. Sure, it’s going to slam straight into the neighboring Andromeda galaxy at some point in the distant future, but for now the Milky Way is pretty much just chilling out, right? Not so fast. …
For astronomers, discovering new worlds, stars, and even entire galaxies is really only half the battle. Once discovered, explaining how new features of space formed, and where they came from, often means extensive research and a bit of guesswork. A new research effort aimed at uncovering some of the secrets of how our home galaxy, …
Back in early 2018, the European Space Agency released the second phase of Milky Way mapping data collected by the agency’s Gaia satellite. With a variety of tools that allow scientists and even casual space fans to browse an immense amount of data, it was a very big deal in for both professional and amateur …
The center of the Milky Way galaxy is somewhere you wouldn’t want to be. We have it pretty easy here on Earth, orbiting our star and staying out of everyone’s way, but deep within the heart of our galaxy, a monster lurks. It’s a supermassive black hole known as Sagittarius A* (that’s pronounced “A star”, …
After years of work and a whole lot of hype, researchers working with the Event Horizon Telescope project finally unveiled the very first image ever captured of an actual black hole this week. The relatively low-res image was nonetheless fantastic, and the fact that scientists were able to capture an image of the black hole …
Judging the size of something is often best done when comparing it to other things, but that line of thinking tends to break down when you start talking about objects in space. Earth is huge, but not when you compare it to something like Jupiter, and Jupiter is tiny compare to our Sun, and our …
Our Solar System has remained largely unchanged for billions of years, and it’s likely to remain that way for a long time to come, but that hasn’t stopped astronomers from looking far into the future in an attempt to forecast some major changes happening to our home galaxy, the Milky Way. A new research effort …
As chaotic as life is here on Earth, it’s not often that we have time to look up at the night sky and ponder the infinite frontier, much less keep track of what’s going on out there. But whether we pay attention or not, the universe keeps changing, often in drastic and jaw-dropping ways. For …
