Milky

An artist’s impression of the system assuming that the massive companion star is a black hole. The brightest background star is its orbital companion, the radio pulsar PSR J0514-4002E. The two stars are separated by 8 million km and circle each other every 7 days. Credit: Daniëlle Futselaar (artsource.nl)Using the MeerKAT Telescope, astronomers found a mysterious object in the Milky Way’s black hole mass gap, challenging existing astronomical classifications and offering a unique opportunity to study the universe’s most…

Astronomer Bob Benjamin has spent the past 20 years trying to figure out what the Milky Way looks like. The work isn't easy, because we're inside the galaxy and can't see it from the outside, but astronomers have ingenious workarounds, and Benjamin thinks “it's a knowable thing.” He carries in his mind a picture of what astronomers have been able to put together so far: a dense, barred center embedded in a layered disk of gas and stars, some of which pile up into arms that spiral through the disk, all encased in a sparse…

One of the biggest mysteries of the universe is why there is a universe at all. According to particle physics, the big bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter, and they should have immediately canceled each other out. But here we are! We're lucky enough to exist, and we get to live in a time when fundamental questions can be asked and potentially answered scientifically. Physicist Luke Caldwell narrates how he and his colleagues made the most precise measurement ever of a property of electrons that…

Distances in space are hard to measure. Unless you know how intrinsically bright something is, working out how far away it is becomes a little complicated.Yet knowing a distance can make a huge difference to how we interpret data. It's not unheard of for astronomers to have to revise their findings based on a new distance measurement of an object.What is unusual is when that happens with something humanity has been staring at for millennia. Astronomers have just now discovered something shocking about one of the most…

Astronomers have discovered unique patterns in a repeating Fast Radio Burst (FRB 20220912A), observed by the SETI Institute. This finding, described in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, challenges existing models of FRBs, which are intense, short-lived radio signals from space. Credit: SciTechDaily.comNew research reveals a never-before-seen behavior in a repeating Fast Radio Burst, offering fresh insights into these mysterious cosmic phenomena.Astronomers are continuing to unravel the mystery of deep…

NASA never fails to amaze with its groundbreaking projects. Currently, NASA scientists and Engineers are gearing up for an extraordinary NASA experiment named GUSTO (Galactic/Extragalactic ULDB Spectroscopic Terahertz Observatory) in Antarctica. According to NASA, this innovative project involves a balloon-borne telescope set to launch "no earlier than December 21” as per NASA. Yes, you read that right, it is a balloon-borne telescope. While it will be no match for the James Webb Space Telescope, It will still be a big…

NASA is preparing to begin an experiment named GUSTO — short for Galactic / Extragalactic ULDB Spectroscopic Terahertz Observatory — to gather data that will be used to create a 3D map of a portion of the Milky Way Galaxy. The GUSTO experiment involves a telescope that will float 120,000 feet over Antarctica on a high-altitude balloon for at least 55 days, soaking up high-frequency radio waves percolating through the cosmic interstellar medium — a term that refers to the gases, dust, radiation, and other materials that…

Looking at all the stars in the night sky, you’d never notice that one of them wasn’t from around here. Astronomers have now found that a star right near the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way likely originated in a smaller galaxy that ours devoured.The Milky Way is home to more than 100 billion stars, and while the vast majority of them were born and raised here, some seem to have migrated in from other galaxies. Most of these intergalactic interlopers are found in the Milky Way’s “halo,” on the very…

The central region of the Milky Way galaxy as captured by the Subaru Telescope. The image shows many stars in a field of view about 0.4 light-years across. The star S0-6 (blue circle), the subject of this study, is located about 0.04 light-years from the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*, green circle). Credit: Miyagi University of Education/NAOJ This week we look at migratory stars, communicative children and how…

Making stars is a messy business. Although the process takes far longer than any human life span, we’ve sufficiently studied its various stages in stellar nurseries scattered around our galaxy to gain a decent overall grasp of how it works. It starts, in general, with a huge swirling cloud of gas and cosmic dust—like the Orion nebula that currently graces our winter skies. Motions in the cloud can give rise to tenuous clumps of material If such a clump grows large enough, it can gain the necessary gravitational pull to…