Milky Way tagged posts

Astronomers may have found our galaxy’s first example of an unusual kind of stellar explosion. This discovery, made with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, adds to the understanding of how some stars shatter and seed the universe with elements critical for life on Earth.

This intriguing object, located near the center of the Milky Way, is a supernova remnant called SagittariusA East, or Sgr A East for short. Based on Chandra data, astronomers previously classified the object as the remains of a massive star that exploded as a supernova, one of many kinds of exploded stars that scientists have catalogued.

Using longer Chandra observations, a team of astronomers has now instead concluded that the object is left over from a different type of supernova...

Survey of the sky pushes the boundaries of what we know about the structure of our galaxy. Scientists from Cardiff University have helped produce a brand-new, three-dimensional survey of our galaxy, allowing them to peer into the inner structure and observe its star-forming processes in unprecedented detail.

The large-scale survey, called SEDIGISM (Structure, Excitation and Dynamics of the Inner Galactic Interstellar Medium), has revealed a wide range of structures within the Milky Way, from individual star-forming clumps to giant molecular clouds and complexes, that will allow astronomers to start pushing the boundaries of what we know about the structure of our galaxy.

SEDIGISM has been unveiled today through the publication of three separate papers in the Monthly Notices of t...

Scientists working with data from the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys’ Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE) have discovered a “fossil galaxy” hidden in the depths of our own Milky Way. This result, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, may shake up our understanding of how the Milky Way grew into the galaxy we see today.

The proposed fossil galaxy may have collided with the Milky Way ten billion years ago, when our galaxy was still in its infancy...

‘Shell structures’ are first of their kind found in the galaxy. Nearly 3 billion years ago, a dwarf galaxy plunged into the center of the Milky Way and was ripped apart by the gravitational forces of the collision. Astrophysicists announced today that the merger produced a series of telltale shell-like formations of stars in the vicinity of the Virgo constellation, the first such “shell structures” to be found in the Milky Way. The finding offers further evidence of the ancient event, and new possible explanations for other phenomena in the galaxy.

Astronomers identified an unusually high density of stars called the Virgo Overdensity about ...