Take a good look at the latest image provided by the Hubble Space Telescope. It shows a huge elliptical galaxy called NGC 474 that lies about 100 million light-years away from us. At about two and a half times larger than our Milky Way Galaxy, it’s really a behemoth. Notice its strange structure – […]
Minecraft is a sandbox game, which sort of means that anything is possible within it. You can even create other games like Crossy Road, or make something massive and pretty like this contest-winning Star Wars construction. It’s even possible to explore the mysteries of space – such as the star-smashing black hole at the centre […]
The incredible snap was taken by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT)– the same instrument that captured the first-ever image of a black hole in 2019. The telescope has been probing Sagittarius A* – a supermassive black hole located at the centre of our galaxy – the Milky Way – since 2015. Now, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has shared its “groundbreaking” discovery. […]
Echoes of light bouncing off thick clouds of material around active black holes are helping astronomers better understand the wacky space-time in the immediate vicinity of these extreme objects. Within the Milky Way, astronomers have just identified eight new examples of these echoing black holes. Previously, only two had been identified within our galaxy. […]
If there are so many galaxies, stars, and planets, where are all the aliens, and why haven’t we heard from them? Those are the simple questions at the heart of the Fermi Paradox. In a new paper, a pair of researchers ask the next obvious question: how long will we have to survive to hear […]
Something deep in the heart of the Milky Way galaxy is glowing with gamma radiation, and nobody can figure out for sure what it might be. Colliding dark matter has been proposed, ruled out, and then tentatively reconsidered. Dense, rapidly rotating objects called pulsars were also considered as candidate sources of the high-energy rays, […]
In two weeks’ time, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is going to present the world with new information about our Milky Way. It’s anyone’s guess what the announcement will be, but based on what we know of their recent efforts, there’s reason to get excited – the results being presented are from the Event Horizon […]
For the first time, scientists have completely mapped one of the ‘bones’ of the Milky Way galaxy. That bone is a long, dense filament of cold gas in the densest part of one of the galaxy’s spiral arms. It measures around 195 light-years in length; the map, acquired using the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy […]
The Milky Way is older than astronomers thought, or part of it is. A newly-published study shows that part of the disk is two billion years older than we thought. The region, called the thick disk, started forming only 0.8 billion years after the Big Bang. A pair of astronomers pieced together the Milky […]
A new image shows a breathtaking galaxy as you have never seen it before. Not only is the image absolutely spectacular, it’s scientifically valuable: By studying the galaxy’s light across multiple wavelengths, scientists can gain a better understanding of star formation and evolution processes. The galaxy in question is an object called NGC 4254, […]
