We are in the Milky Way. If you travelled on an extremely fast spaceship for more than two million years, you would reach our neighbour, the Andromeda galaxy. All other galaxies are even further away.
There could be thousands of black holes at the heart of the Milky Way.
An artist’s impression of the predicted merger between our Milky Way (right) and the neighboring Andromeda galaxy (left). So which galaxy will dominate?
NASA; ESA; Z. Levay and R. van der Marel, STScI; T. Hallas; and A. Mellinger
Bigger galaxies tend to dominate the smaller, when the two collide. But the pending battle between our Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy might be a much fairer fight than we previously thought.
An image by MeerKAT shows hydrogen gas in M83, a famous spiral galaxy.
SKA SA
A precursor to the Square Kilometre Array- the MeerKAT telescope - is being built right now and remarkable progress has been made in the last 12 months.
Here, an alien crew member, Saru on Star Trek: Discovery. We often rely on science fiction to guide our expectations of alien life. We can hope lessons about accepting beings very different from yourself can be extracted by the series end.
(Courtesy of CBS Studios)
Star Trek: Discovery explores our corner of the block – just a fraction of the galaxy. Some stars are better candidates for intelligent alien life, and it may not be anything like we imagine.
Detecting cosmic ray particles: a water-Cherenkov detector seen against the night sky at the Pierre Auger Observatory in western Argentina.
Steven Saffi, University of Adelaide
Scientists say they now know that high energy cosmic ray particles that bombard Earth are coming from outside our galaxy. But the actual source still remains a mystery.
Lasers being shone from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile.
These lasers help remove the twinkles in the night sky and help astronomers see stars clearer on Earth than ever before.
F. Kamphues/ESO
What caused the Big Bang is still a mystery. And that’s just one of the many unanswered questions, in spite of everything we do know about the birth of the Universe.
They’re back: Gamora (Zoe Saldana), Nebula (Karen Gillan), Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), Drax (Dave Bautista) and Rocket voice by Bradley Cooper).
Walt Disney/Marvel Studios
The Guardians of the Galaxy team are rocking the universe again in the latest volume of the science fiction blockbuster. But how does the science stand up to some number crunching?
Astronomers are surprised by what they’re finding out about galaxies that formed in the early days of our universe, now that sensitive telescopes allow direct observation, not the inference of old.
Untangling the history of the Milky Way.
ESO/S Brunier
What did Isaac Newton, Captain Cook and Eddie Mabo all have in common? Each, in their own way, looked to the heavens to make sense of the world, and the importance of their place in it.