Galactic Center

If you want to stay grounded—which is to say, you want a haunting reminder of your own diminutive size and mortality—do I have the tool for you. Meet Galactic Compass: an app which will point the user towards the whopping black hole at the center of our galaxy, Sagittarius A*.How Dave Bautista Raised His Game For Dune: Part TwoAs you read this article, you are hurtling through space on a spinning, wobbling sphere, which is itself spinning around a hot ball of gas at the center of our solar system. But if you zoom much,…

The center of our galaxy is a menagerie of exotic objects; a supermassive black hole, clouds of hot gas, and giant stars that can help inform the origin story of much of the universe. Using the Webb telescope, scientists got to see this chaotic region of the Milky Way in a different light, revealing new features and incredible detail in a glimmering portrait of the galactic center. Webb Telescope Images the Pillars of CreationThe latest image from the Webb Space Telescope captured a portion of the Milky Way’s dense core,…

A group of astronomers comprising the Pristine Inner Galaxy Survey (PIGS) just found a large group of ancient stars circling the galaxy’s center in surprisingly orderly fashion.What Is Planet Nine and Why Can’t We Find It?The astronomical team’s work is the largest set of detailed observations yet taken of these very old metal-poor stars orbiting near the core of the Milky Way. The research was presented this week at the National Astronomy Meeting 2023 at the University of Cardiff. “It is exciting to think that we are…

Behold, the stringy, rainbowesque melange of one-dimensional structures hidden in plain sight across the galactic center. Or should we say plane sight? The tendrils measure 5 to 150 light-years in length, and now a team of scientists hasfound filaments that stretch out parallel to the galactic plane surrounding the supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s center, like fingers on a splayed hand.What Is Planet Nine and Why Can’t We Find It?These one-dimensional structures were first discovered in the 1980s by Farhad…

The Andromeda Galaxy captured by the NASA Galaxy Evolution Mapper in 2012.Image: NASA/JPL-CaltechIn the quest to find the outer limits of our galaxy, astronomers have discovered over 200 stars that form the Milky Way’s edge, the most distant of which is over one million light-years away—nearly halfway to the Andromeda galaxy.The 208 stars the researchers identified are known as RR Lyrae stars, which are stars with a brightness that can change as viewed from Earth. These stars are typically old and brighten and dim at…

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) looking up at the Milky Way as well as the location of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at our galactic centre. Highlighted in the box is the image of Sagittarius A* taken by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration.Image: ESO/José Francisco Salgado (josefrancisco.org), EHT CollaborationThe supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy is being circled by a bubble of hot gas, according to recent analysis by the Event Horizon…