This is an artist’s impression showing the peanut shaped structure in the central bulge. Credit: ESO/NASA/JPL-Caltech/M. Kornmesser/R. Hurt

The first large-scale age-map of the Milky Way shows that a period of star formation lasting around 4 billion years created the complex structure at the heart of our galaxy. The results will be presented by Marina Rejkuba at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science (EWASS) in Liverpool on Tuesday, 3rd April.

The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy with a bulge at the centre, thousands of light years in diameter, that contains about a quarter of the total mass of stars...

This is a composite image of NGC 4565 used in the new study. Credit: C. M. Lombilla / IAC

The galaxy we inhabit, the Milky Way, may be getting even bigger, according to Cristina Martínez-Lombilla, a PhD candidate at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Tenerife, Spain, and her collaborators. She will present the work of her team in a talk on Tuesday 3 April at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science in Liverpool.

The Solar System is located in one of the arms in the disc of a barred spiral galaxy we call the Milky Way, with a diameter of about 100,000 light years. Our home galaxy consists of several hundred billion stars, with huge amounts of gas and dust, all intermingled and interacting through the force of gravity...

Ixodes scapularis ticks transmit the pathogens of Lyme disease, resulting a multisystem illness in a variety of animals and humans. The image shows bottom side a live Ixodes tick as seen under a confocal immunofluorescence microscope. Credit: Dr. Utpal Pal, University of Maryland

Findings have major implications for tick-borne diseases like Lyme disease. Researchers have uncovered a mechanism by which the bacteria that cause Lyme disease persist in the human body and fight the body’s early, innate immune responses. Dr. Utpal Pal, Professor in Veterinary Medicine at the University of Maryland (UMD), has been studying the Borrelia burgdorferi bacteria throughout his 12 years with UMD, and his work has already produced the protein marker used to identify this bacterial infection in the body...