“All good things must come to an end.” That adage holds true in the cosmos as well as on Earth. We are aware that stars, like everything else, must die. When they run out of the fuel supply needed for nuclear fusion at their cores, stars of all sizes collapse under their own gravity, dying […]
Scientists have found that unusually massive black holes seem to be absent from the diffuse outer halo of the Milky Way. The discovery could spell bad news for theories that suggest the universe’s most mysterious form of “stuff,” dark matter, is composed of primordial black holes that formed in the first moments after the Big […]
The monster black hole at the center of our galaxy may be unleashing huge, gassy explosions — and now, astronomers think they’ve pinpointed the exact spot where that superheated gas is spilling into the Milky Way. Acting like a gargantuan exhaust vent, the newly discovered feature is a bright region of X-ray energy that’s nearly […]
Fast radio bursts flash in the sky over Earth. | Credit: NRAO Outreach/T. Jarrett (IPAC/Caltech); B. Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are intense, short-lived blasts of radio waves hailing from beyond the Milky Way that can emit the same amount of energy in just thousandths of a second that the sun takes three days […]
If you were attacked by a ravenous vampire star or were at risk of falling into two dueling black holes, you’d probably run, too! One of these terrifying scenarios is likely responsible for sending a low-mass star on the run through the Milky Way at a staggering million miles per hour (1.6 million kilometers per […]
Astronomers have spotted flares and echos coming from the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). These “cosmic fireworks” and X-ray echoes could help scientists better understand the dark and quiet cosmic titan around which our galaxy orbits. The team of Michigan State University researchers made the groundbreaking […]
New findings from the Gaia space telescope indicate the Milky Way may have cannibalized a small galaxy not too long ago, cosmically speaking. In fact, the last major collision between our galaxy and another seems to have occurred billions of years later than previously suspected. The Milky Way has been long understood to have grown […]
It seems like everything orbits something in space. Moons orbit planets. Planets orbit stars. Stars orbit the centers of galaxies. But beyond that, things get a little harder to visualize. Do galaxies — and, specifically, the Milky Way — orbit anything? To answer that, we first need to know how orbits work. Consider two objects […]
Construction of the Extremely Large Telescope has reached another milestone, with the completion of the dome’s steel skeleton. The European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) — the world’s largest visible- and infrared-light telescope — is under development on the Cerro Armazones mountain in Chile’s Atacama Desert and is expected to see its […]
A team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have discovered three of the oldest stars in the universe. To their surprise, the stars were not in some far off galaxy that only the ultra-powerful James Webb Space Telescope can spot. They are in our own galactic neighborhood inside the Milky Way’s “halo,” according to a study published May 14 in the […]
This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Or Graur is an associate professor of Astrophysics at the University of Portsmouth’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, an honorary associate professor at University College London (UCL), and a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History. […]
It seems like everything orbits something in space. Moons orbit planets. Planets orbit stars. Stars orbit the centers of galaxies. But beyond that, things get a little harder to visualize. Do galaxies — and, specifically, the Milky Way — orbit anything? To answer that, we first need to know how orbits work. Consider two objects […]