Milky

Extending high above and below the Milky Way's galactic plane, a pair of huge, symmetrical blobs of gas stretch out like the lobes of a cosmic hourglass, glowing faintly with an X-ray radiance.They're known as eROSITA bubbles, named after the X-ray telescope that spotted them in 2020, and are located in the Milky Way's massive shell of gas, or 'circumgalactic medium', extending some 45,661 light-years either side of the galactic center.The energetic gasses making up the bubbles were assumed to have a fairly even, if…

Happy Monday. We are kicking off the week with a packed edition of ETtech Morning Dispatch. You can’t have missed all those social media posts talking about the government-backed Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) over the last few days. ONDC is looking to challenge food-delivery biggies Swiggy and Zomato through a price war. We have details on what’s going on.Also in the letter:■ Online gaming platforms against SRO backed by IAMAI■ Early­-stage VC 3one4 gets $200 million for new fund■ ETtech Explainer: What does it…

Our galaxy's largest nearby companion is the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a dwarf galaxy visible to the naked eye in the Southern Hemisphere.In recent years, new theoretical research and better observational capabilities have taught astronomers a great deal about our (not-so-little) neighbor.It's becoming increasingly clear that the LMC is helping shape the Milky Way's evolution."It was long assumed that our galaxy lives a quiet life of a hermit, with the nearest 'big' neighbor being Andromeda some 800 kiloparsecs…

Comets are of great interest to scientists as they are remnants of the early Solar System, providing valuable information about its composition and conditions. One of these is the Rare Green Comet ZTF which made its extremely rare approach to Earth just last month. The tech that discovered Comet ZTF was the wide-field survey camera at the Zwicky Transient Facility in 2022 in March last year.While comets often pass close to Earth, Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) is particularly noteworthy because it has a 50000-year orbit, meaning…

The Andromeda Galaxy is home to several interesting objects, including globular clusters, planetary nebulae, and supernovae. It is one of the most distant, yet easily visible objects to the eye. Also known as Messier 31, it is a spiral galaxy located approximately 2.5 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Andromeda. One of the most striking features of Andromeda is its bright central region, known as the nucleus, which is home to a supermassive black hole. Apart from this, the galaxy also has spiral…

Detail of the globular cluster Messier 92 (M92) captured by Webb’s NIRCam instrument. This field of view covers the lower left quarter of the right half of the full image. Globular clusters are dense masses of tightly packed stars that all formed around the same time. In M92, there are about 300,000 stars packed into a ball about 100 light-years across. The night sky of a planet in the middle of M92 would shine with thousands of stars that appear thousands of times brighter than those in our own sky. The image shows stars…

The Galactic center at a distance of about 30000 light years. In the center of the image is the supermassive black hole Sgr A* (not visible). The position of Sgr A* can be inferred from the motion of the stars. Because of the dust cloud and its dimensions around X3a the baby star is also not visible in this image. Credit: Florian PeißkerA team of international researchers led by Dr. Florian Peißker at the Institute of Astrophysics at the University of Cologne has discovered a newly forming star near the supermassive…

A new analysis of the most energetic light sources in our galaxy may have provided scientists with a shocking revelation. According to a new paper accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics, star formation in the Milky Way is happening at a much higher rate than current estimates. As such, our galaxy may not be as dormant as scientists thought. This discovery is exceptional because it fundamentally changes what we know about the rate at which our galaxy could be expanding. Galaxies expand, with…

The study reports that X7 is being pulled apart as the supermassive black hole, called Sagittarius A*, drags it closer. Credit: Anna Ciurlo/UCLA<span class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>UCLA</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. It is organized into the College of Letters and Science and 12 professional schools.…

An analysis of the most energetic light in the galaxy has revealed we may be mistaken about star formation rates in the Milky Way.Gamma rays produced by the radioactive decay of isotopes produced during star formation reveal that stars are forming at a rate of four to eight times the mass of the Sun per year. That may not seem like a lot, but it's two to four times more than current estimates, suggesting that our home galaxy isn't quite as quiescent as we had thought.And this has important implications for our…