Milky Way

Astronomers from the European Southern Observatory have released a striking new image of the Milky Way galaxy that shows more than 84 million stars, 10 times more than previous studies have provided. The zoomable image , constructed by computer-merging thousands of individual images, contains more than 9 billion pixels and would, if printed at the resolution of a typical book, measure 30 feet long and 23 feet tall. The individual images used in the composite were obtained with the 4.1-meter (161-inch)

Planet-hunting scientists were dealt a major blow Wednesday when NASA officials announced that a crucial wheel on the Kepler space telescope had ceased to function and that the craft had been placed in safe mode. Even as NASA officials raised the possibility that they could get the telescope back up and running, scientists began mourning the potential loss of a spacecraft that they said had fundamentally altered our understanding of alien planets in the Milky Way - and Earth's place in an increasingly crowded galaxy.

For those of you worried about the nearby Andromeda galaxy colliding with our own Milky Way in the distant future, here's a little perspective: Turns out our spiral galaxy is still reeling from a hard knock it suffered as recently as 100 million years ago  -- but it's likely to recover just as quickly, say researchers at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. Fermilab scientists looked at about 300,000 stars cataloged by...

Peering deep into the universe, scientists have discovered the earliest known starburst galaxy - a revved-up stellar factory popping out stars thousands of times faster than the Milky Way. The find, described in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature, could help alter scientists' understanding of the early evolution of galaxies and larger structures in the universe. The galaxy, named HFLS 3, existed about 880 million years after the big bang, when the universe was about 6% of its current age, astronomers say. And it's churning out stars with sun-sized mass at the incredible rate of roughly 2,900 per year.

Our Milky Way is, by and large, a run-of-the-mill galaxy except for one thing. Actually, except for two things: the large and small Magellanic Clouds orbiting it. Astronomers had previously not seen such dwarf galaxies orbiting another spiral galaxy like ours, leading many to believe that the Milky Way was unique in this respect. But a new study from Australia suggests that although such complicated systems are not common, they are also not unique. Aaron Robotham of the University of Western Australia and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and his team used radio telescopes operated by the Australian node of the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research and the Australian Astronomical Observatory to search for similar galaxies in the southern skies.

When humans gaze up at the night sky, they may view the fuzzy streak of the Milky Way and contemplate their place in the universe. When dung beetles see the Milky Way, their thoughts turn to keeping their food source away from other insects. Scientists have found that these inch-long creatures use the glowing edge of the galaxy to guide them as they roll their balls of dung across the African landscape. The report, published online Thursday by the journal Current Biology, provides the first documentation of animals using the Milky Way for navigation.

Numerous readers have requested recipes for the guacamole served at Milky Way restaurant on Pico Boulevard. Naturally, we were curious about the guacamole too, because Steven ("ET") Spielberg's mother runs the restaurant. So we took flight to the Milky Way. And, yes, we met Spielberg's mother, Leah Adler, a vivacious, cheerful, competent woman who rules the Milky Way with the regal air of Queen Elizabeth--The First.

The Milky Way is set to collide with its closest neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, astronomers working with the Hubble Space Telescope said Thursday. Galactic residents need not brace for impact just yet, however: The predicted collision would take place in 4 billion years. Andromeda, officially known as Messier 31, or M31, is located about 2.5 million light-years away from the Milky Way - which would make it our closest fellow spiral galaxy. Spiral galaxies have flat, rotating, disc-shaped bodies with spiral arms  anchored by a supermassive black hole at the center.

White dwarf stars are dying stars - burned-out cinders that have exhausted the hydrogen that sustains them. But scientists may soon count on these stellar flameouts to unravel the history of the Milky Way. In a study published online Wednesday by the journal Nature, astronomer Jason Kalirai described a new technique for calculating the masses and ages of old stars based on the masses of the white dwarfs they have become. The new information will help researchers better understand the formation of Earth's galaxy.

Squinting into the dark heart of the Milky Way, astronomers have discovered a star that orbits closer to the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy than any other star yet observed. The relatively dim star, known as S0-102, is so close that it takes just 11.5 years to circle the black hole at speeds as high as 5,000 kilometers per second - or 1.7% as fast as the speed of light. The previous record-holder, S0-2, took 16 years to make its way around. A black hole is a star whose mass has collapsed to a point called a singularity.

What if a disaster-movie sendup bred with a potty-mouthed Seth Rogen comedy  and a James Franco-playing-James Franco Sundance-y experiment? The answer would be Sony's "This Is The End," to the question you may well not have asked. In the don't-call-it-a-"Pineapple-Express"-sequel from Rogen and creative partner Evan Goldberg, the apocalypse arrives during a party attended by a lot of famous young actors. That allows them to say and do the outrageous things as themselves, or at least as themselves under air quotes.

When humans gaze up at the night sky, they may view the fuzzy streak of the Milky Way and contemplate their place in the universe. When dung beetles see the Milky Way, their thoughts turn to keeping their food source away from other insects. Scientists have found that these inch-long creatures use the glowing edge of the galaxy to guide them as they roll their balls of dung across the African landscape. The report, published online Thursday by the journal Current Biology, provides the first documentation of animals using the Milky Way for navigation.

A discovery that many small companion galaxies surrounding Andromeda seem to orbit in concert - and aligned in a vast, thin disk - could change scientists' understanding of how galaxies form, researchers said Wednesday. A team of astronomers led by Rodrigo Ibata of the Observatoire Astronomique de Strasbourg in Strasbourg, France, made the discovery about the dwarf galaxies using observations collected by the Pan-Andromeda Archaeological Survey, which studied the Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies, also known as M31 and M33. The survey uses the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope in Hawaii.

Astronomers from the European Southern Observatory have released a striking new image of the Milky Way galaxy that shows more than 84 million stars, 10 times more than previous studies have provided. The zoomable image , constructed by computer-merging thousands of individual images, contains more than 9 billion pixels and would, if printed at the resolution of a typical book, measure 30 feet long and 23 feet tall. The individual images used in the composite were obtained with the 4.1-meter (161-inch)

Squinting into the dark heart of the Milky Way, astronomers have discovered a star that orbits closer to the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy than any other star yet observed. The relatively dim star, known as S0-102, is so close that it takes just 11.5 years to circle the black hole at speeds as high as 5,000 kilometers per second - or 1.7% as fast as the speed of light. The previous record-holder, S0-2, took 16 years to make its way around. A black hole is a star whose mass has collapsed to a point called a singularity.

Our Milky Way is, by and large, a run-of-the-mill galaxy except for one thing. Actually, except for two things: the large and small Magellanic Clouds orbiting it. Astronomers had previously not seen such dwarf galaxies orbiting another spiral galaxy like ours, leading many to believe that the Milky Way was unique in this respect. But a new study from Australia suggests that although such complicated systems are not common, they are also not unique. Aaron Robotham of the University of Western Australia and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and his team used radio telescopes operated by the Australian node of the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research and the Australian Astronomical Observatory to search for similar galaxies in the southern skies.

A UCLA astronomer has discovered faint "threads" weaving their way through the center of the Milky Way galaxy that are more than 600 trillion miles long, opening a new page in astronomical research. The "threads" have never been seen before and no one is certain what they are, where they came from or what they mean. "It was quite unexpected," says the astronomer, Mark Morris, who made the discovery with a colleague, Farhad Yusef-Zadeh of Columbia University.

Astronomers have identified what appear to be the oldest "living" stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and they appear to be nearly as old as the universe itself. The Milky Way is the galaxy of which the Earth and the sun are a part. Living stars are those that still burn hydrogen by nuclear reaction.

A newly discovered cluster of galaxies, more than 5 billion light years from Earth, may help astronomers understand a basic, but vexing, question about our universe: How do galaxies spawn their stars? Cluster SPT-CLJ2344-4243 is among the most massive clusters of galaxies in the universe, and produces X-rays at a rate faster than any other known cluster. It also creates new stars at an “unmatched” pace of more than 700 per year, said Michael McDonald, a Hubble fellow at MIT and lead author of a paper detailing the cluster's properties, published online Wednesday in the journal Nature . “This extreme rate of star formation was unexpected,” he said during a NASA news conference Wednesday, noting that the Milky Way forms just one or two stars a year.

Astronomers using the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope in Hawaii have discovered four pairs of binary stars doing something researchers had previously believed to be impossible: orbiting each other with periods of less than four hours. One whirling dervish pair whip around each other in only 2.5 hours, a remarkably short period for such massive objects. Astronomers had previously believed that any binaries orbiting in such close proximity would coalesce into a single star. That may eventually prove true, but it appears to be happening more slowly than expected -- at least in some cases.