Milky Way tagged posts

Understanding Blended Galaxies

This image shows three instances of merging galaxies located at least a billion light years from Earth. Each galaxy is as large as the Milky Way and contains about 100 billion stars. Violent gravitational interactions created the tidal tails shown and triggered massive black hole accretion at the galactic nuclei. These systems were first confirmed by Hai Fu in 2015. Credit: Hai Fu, University of Iowa

This image shows three instances of merging galaxies located at least a billion light years from Earth. Each galaxy is as large as the Milky Way and contains about 100 billion stars. Violent gravitational interactions created the tidal tails shown and triggered massive black hole accretion at the galactic nuclei. These systems were first confirmed by Hai Fu in 2015. Credit: Hai Fu, University of Iowa

Astrophysicist wins grant to find and characterize super massive black holes associated with merging galaxies. In roughly 4 billion years, the Milky Way will be no more. Indeed, our home galaxy is on course to collide and unite with the Andromeda Galaxy, at present some 2 million light years away...

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A Giant Stellar Void in the Milky Way

An artist's impression of the implied distribution of young stars, represented here by Cepheids shown as blue stars, plotted on the background of a drawing of the Milky Way. With the exception of a small clump in the Galactic center, the central 8,000 light years appear to have very few Cepheids, and hence very few young stars. Credit: The University of Tokyo

An artist’s impression of the implied distribution of young stars, represented here by Cepheids shown as blue stars, plotted on the background of a drawing of the Milky Way. With the exception of a small clump in the Galactic center, the central 8,000 light years appear to have very few Cepheids, and hence very few young stars. Credit: The University of Tokyo

A major revision is required in our understanding of our Milky Way Galaxy according to an international team led by Prof Noriyuki Matsunaga of the University of Tokyo. The Japanese, South African and Italian astronomers find that there is a huge region around the centre of our own Galaxy, which is devoid of young stars...

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Milky Way now Hidden from 1/3 of Humanity

Milky Way now hidden from one-third of humanity

Light pollution now blots out the Milky Way for eight in 10 Americans. Bright areas in this map show where the sky glow from artificial lighting blots out the stars and constellations. An international team of researchers has released the new World Atlas of Artificial Sky Brightness, in a paper published in Science Advances today. Credit: Falchi et al, Science Advances; Jakob Grothe/National Park Service, Matthew Price/CIRES/CU-Boulder.

The Milky Way is but a faded memory to one third of humanity and 80% of Americans, according to a new global atlas of light pollution. In most developed countries, the ubiquitous presence of artificial lights creates a luminous fog that swamps the stars and constellations of the night sky...

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Computer Simulations Shed Light on the Milky Way’s Missing Red Giants

A sequence of snapshots from a simulation showing a red giant star tunneling through a high density gas clump. The star is moving downward in the illustration, as indicated by the bow-shaped "onion skin" surfaces of constant density. Soon after the star plunges into the clump, it develops a high temperature "blister" at the point of impact and a full turbulent wake behind it. Credit: Georgia Tech

A sequence of snapshots from a simulation showing a red giant star tunneling through a high density gas clump. The star is moving downward in the illustration, as indicated by the bow-shaped “onion skin” surfaces of constant density. Soon after the star plunges into the clump, it develops a high temperature “blister” at the point of impact and a full turbulent wake behind it. Credit: Georgia Tech

Why is the center of the Milky Way filled with young stars but has very few old ones. According to the theory, the remnants of older, red giant stars are still there – they just aren’t bright enough to be detected with telescopes...

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