Something mysterious is pulling our Milky Way through space at a much faster rate than expected. So what could it be?
Except for a few blue foreground stars, the stars are part of the Milky Way’s nuclear star cluster, the most massive and densest star cluster in our galaxy.
NASA, ESA, and Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA, Acknowledgment: T. Do, A.Ghez (UCLA), V. Bajaj (STScI)
Each fortnight I get the amazing opportunity to speak about my top stories in space on ABC Breakfast News TV but for those of you who hate early mornings I wanted to make sure you got to hear of these…
Can a galaxy (like NGC 3810 in this case) have a classical spiral structure and also be already dead?
ESA/Hubble and NASA
Extragalactic astrophysicists want to know how and why galaxies stop forming stars, change their shape and fade away. With help from citizen scientists, they’re figuring it out.
CSIRO’s Compact Array telescope under the Milky Way.
Alex Cherney
A new model suggests that elliptical galaxies are more likely to be habitable than spiral galaxies like our own. Does that mean we’re a freak event and elsewhere is teeming with life?
Hurricane Arthur photographed by ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst.
ESA/NASA
Every 30 mil years, Earth has to deal with more comet crashes from space and more intense geological activity from within. Dark matter may be the culprit in these episodes that can cause mass extinction.
Observations of the dusty cloud G2 as it approaches and then swings around the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.
ESO/A. Eckart
The best observations yet of a mysterious gas cloud that was heading for the black hole at the hear of our Milky Way reveal it may have more stellar origins.
This artist’s impression of the Milky Way galaxy. The blue halo of material surrounding the galaxy indicates the expected distribution of the mysterious dark matter.
ESO/L. Calçada
While invisible, dark matter completely dominates our Milky Way, recent measurements of just how much dark matter there is have revealed a bit of a mystery. In a paper published today in the Astrophysical…
The Large Magellanic Cloud (right) visible in the southern sky is a nearby galaxy to our own.
Flickr/Tracey Harrison Hill
If the solution to a problem does not reveal itself straight away then why not let your initial guesswork evolve? That’s the approach we’ve taken in trying to determine the mass of our galaxy by mapping…
Being spiral in shape, our Galaxy is already in permanent rotational motion. But astronomers have found that the Milky Way…
Two lobes of charged particles (light blue) have been discovered coming from the galactic centre.
Ettore Carretti, S-PASS, Axel Mellinger, Eli Bressert.
It’s not every day that you discover a huge structure that stretches more than half way across the sky. But this exact thing happened to the international team of astronomers I was leading, as we pored…
Australian astronomer Professor Ken Freeman has won a major American astronomy prize.
AAP
Australian astronomer Professor Ken Freeman has been awarded the American Astronomical Society’s top prize. The prestigious Henry Norris Russell Lectureship was awarded to Professor Freeman for his work…
A vital part of professional astronomy is collecting data using large telescopes. In many cases, these telescopes are national or international facilities, with time available to all through a competitive…
Viewed from afar, the Milky Way might appear similar to the galaxy known as NGC 7331.
R. Jay GaBany/NASA
Where are we within our galaxy? How did our galaxy form? How did it evolve over the aeons? Astronomers have been asking these questions for the past century, and have recently begun discerning the answers…