The Milky Way is the barred spiral galaxy that contains the Sun and every star visible to the unaided eye. It spans roughly a hundred thousand light-years and holds on the order of a hundred billion stars, with the Sun orbiting about twenty-six thousand light-years out from the center. At its core sits Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole of about four million solar masses. Because we observe the galaxy from inside it, mapping its true structure is unexpectedly hard, and the Gaia mission has spent years redrawing that map one star at a time.
Astrophysics · Milky Way · Stars
The Sun was not born alone. It formed in a cluster with thousands of sibling stars that long ago scattered across the galaxy. Using a spacecraft that ...
Astrophysics · Milky Way · Galactic Center
In 2010, a space telescope revealed two colossal balloons of energy tens of thousands of light-years above and below the center of our galaxy, the sca...
Astrophysics · Milky Way · Star Clusters
Scattered around every large galaxy are dense spheres of hundreds of thousands of stars, among the oldest things in the universe. They once revealed o...
Cosmology · Large-Scale Structure · Voids
In 1981, a redshift survey turned up an emptiness so vast that if the Milky Way sat at its center, we might not have learned other galaxies existed un...
Astrophysics · Galaxies · Local Group
For decades, astronomers told a confident story: in about five billion years, the Milky Way and Andromeda would crash together. New Gaia and Hubble da...
Cosmology · Large-Scale Structure · Superclusters
The Milky Way is falling toward a gravitational anomaly we cannot easily see, hidden behind the dust of our own galaxy. Three decades of measuring how...