A striking new image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy has revealed the strong magnetic field that surrounds it, twisting and turning like a spiral. It’s a never-before-seen view of Sagittarius A* (or Sgr A*), the immense black hole at the Milky Way’s core that gobbles up nearby light and […]
Astronomers have released an image of strong magnetic fields spiralling at the edge of the Milky Way’s central black hole. The new image from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration shows the organised magnetic fields at the edge of the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). Researchers say this new view of the monster […]
By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Astronomers on Wednesday announced that they have detected a strong and organized magnetic field twisted in a spiral pattern around the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, revealing previously unknown qualities of the immensely powerful object lurking at the center of our galaxy. The structure of the magnetic field emanating […]
By tracking the motions of billions of stars in our galaxy, the Gaia space telescope has been unraveling the history of the Milky Way — and the spacecraft’s latest findings disentangle that story in a more literal way than ever before. Gaia has discovered two ancient streams of stars that appear to have woven together […]
By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Astronomers have identified two ancient streams of stars – named after the Hindu deities Shakti and Shiva – that appear to be among the Milky Way’s earliest building blocks, offering new insight into how our galaxy came together long ago. These structures, found using observations from the European Space […]
Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. Astronomers have used the Gaia space telescope to spy some of the first building blocks of the Milky Way galaxy: two ancient streams of stars named Shakti and Shiva that helped our home galaxy grow and […]
The Milky Way is our home galaxy, but how well do we actually know it? As part of a NASA-funded project, a team led by Villanova University researchers has obtained a never-before-seen view of the central engine at the heart of our galaxy. The new map of this central region of the Milky Way, which […]
Mar. 10—Our status as milk-producing mammals would not be lost on intelligent aliens studying the history of our astronomy. The ancient Greeks, they would learn, described a milkiness in the night sky. And when the road-building Romans followed, they saw in that milkiness the shape of, well, a road or a “way,” now a highway. […]
In the Milky Way, not far from our sun, lies a colossal chain of gas clouds. It’s called the Radcliffe Wave. Some 800 million stars live within the Radcliffe Wave, and the wave’s star-forming gas is even now seeding hundreds of millions more. As you may imagine, the astronomers who discovered the Wave named it […]
A new view from the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) captures the abundant star-forming region at the center of the Milky Way. The VLT, located in Chile’s Atacama Desert, snapped an infrared image of a region called Sagittarius C (Sgr C), which is located about 300 light-years from the Milky Way’s central […]
The supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy is spinning so fast that it is warping spacetime into an oval shape reminiscent of an American football (or a rugby ball for any non-American readers!. The finding comes from a careful study of radio and X-ray observations. According to Albert Einstein‘s theory […]
Stars have been caught crawling around the outskirts of the Milky Way more sluggishly than expected, a slow motion that scientists say can only be explained if our dark matter galaxy map is wrong. Specific Velocities of stars around the edges of galaxies have historically been dead giveaways for the presence of dark matter in […]