Tag Archive for 'Milky Way'

Illustration of NASA’s Voyager spacecraft showing the antennas used by the Plasma Wave Subsystem and other instruments. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.

Voyager 1 Detects Plasma Waves in Interstellar Medium

May 12, 2021 by News Staff

Launched in September 1977, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft flew by Jupiter in 1979 and then Saturn in late 1980. In August 2012, it crossed the heliopause...

An artist’s impression of an antimatter star. Image credit: Sci-News.com.

Antimatter Stars Could Be Lurking in Milky Way

May 4, 2021 by Natali Anderson

Astronomers using data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have identified 14 candidate antistars — stars made of antimatter — in...

An artist’s impression of the Roque 12 binary system in the Pleiades cluster. Image credit: Sci-News.com / NASA / ESA / AURA / Caltech.

Exoplanets and Brown Dwarfs Could Be Used as Detectors of Light Dark Matter, Physicists Say

Apr 26, 2021 by News Staff

Dark matter with masses below 1 GeV can scatter, become captured, deposit annihilation energy, and increase the heat flow within extrasolar gas giants,...

Images of the Milky Way and the Large Magellanic Cloud are overlaid on a map of the surrounding Galactic halo. The smaller structure is a wake created by the Large Magellanic Cloud’s motion through this region. The larger light-blue feature corresponds to a high density of stars observed in the northern hemisphere of our Galaxy. Image credit: NASA / ESA / JPL-Caltech / Conroy et al., doi: 10.1038/s41586-021-03385-7.

Astronomers Create New Map of Milky Way’s Halo

Apr 22, 2021 by News Staff

Astronomers using data ESA’s Gaia mission and NASA’s Near Earth Object Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) have created a map of the outermost...

This image from the SRG/eROSITA all-sky survey shows SNR Hoinga (marked); the large bright source in the lower quadrant of the image is from SNR Vela; the image colors are correlated with the energies of the detected X-ray photons; red represents the 0.3-0.6 keV energy range, green 0.6-1.0 keV and blue 1.0-2.3 keV. Image credit: SRG / eROSITA / Becker et al., doi: 10.1051/0004-6361/202040156.

eROSITA X-Ray Telescope Spots Enormous Supernova Remnant

Mar 5, 2021 by News Staff

Astronomers using data from the eROSITA X-ray telescope aboard the Spektrum-Roentgen-Gamma (SRG) observatory have detected the largest supernova remnant...

An artist’s impression of a water-world exoplanet. Image credit: Sci-News.com.

Aquatic Planets are Common in Our Milky Way Galaxy, Study Suggests

Feb 23, 2021 by News Staff

In a study published in the journal Science Advances, a team of European astronomers shows that water can be delivered to a terrestrial planet in the form...

This composite image contains data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue) and the NSF’s Very Large Array (red) of Sgr A East. This object is located very close to the supermassive black hole in the Milky Way’s center, and likely overruns the disk of material surrounding the black hole. Image credit: NASA / CXC / Nanjing University / Zhou et al. / NSF / NRAO / VLA.

Chandra Finds Rare Supernova Remnant in Milky Way’s Center

Feb 9, 2021 by News Staff

Sagittarius A East (Sgr A East), a supernova remnant located strikingly close to the central supermassive black hole of our Milky Way Galaxy, resulted...

An artist’s impression of a thin gas cloud formed by tidal disruption from a passing star. Wang et al. think this is one of the possible ways the cold clump of gas detected in the study could have been formed. Image credit: Mark Myers / OzGrav.

Radio Astronomers Detect ‘Invisible’ Filament of Cold Gas

Feb 5, 2021 by News Staff

Using CSIRO’s Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) and background radio galaxies, astronomers have spotted a long cloud of cold hydrogen...

An artist’s impression of the KIC 8462852 binary system. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.

Milky Way’s ‘Most Mysterious Star’ Has a Companion

Feb 2, 2021 by Sergio Prostak

KIC 8462852, a mysteriously dimming star located about 1,480 light-years away in the constellation of Cygnus, is, in fact, a binary stellar system, made...

This image from the SkyMapper Telescope shows the vicinity of the Tucana II galaxy. Image credit: Anirudh Chiti, MIT.

Huge Dark Matter Halo Spotted around Milky Way’s Dwarf Satellite Galaxy

Feb 2, 2021 by News Staff

Astronomers using with the Australian National University 1.3-m SkyMapper telescope have detected an extended dark matter halo around Tucana II, an ultrafaint...

This Hubble image shows ESO 455-10, a planetary nebula located in the constellation of Scorpius. The color image is composed of near-infrared and optical observations from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). Four filters were used to sample various wavelengths. The color results from assigning different hues to each monochromatic image associated with an individual filter. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / L. Stanghellini.

Hubble Spots Beautiful Planetary Nebula

Jan 25, 2021 by Enrico de Lazaro

NASA has released a spectacular photo taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope of the planetary nebula ESO 455-10. This Hubble image shows ESO 455-10,...

An artist’s impression of a neutron star. Image credit: Sci-News.com.

Astrophysicists May Have Found Evidence of Long-Sought Axions

Jan 19, 2021 by News Staff

First theorized in the 1970s, axions are hypothetical particles that were proposed to preserve a time-reversal symmetry of the nuclear force. These particles...

This visualization represents a 3D map of brown dwarfs (red dots) that have been discovered within 65 light-years of the Sun. The Sun, which is not shown, is located at the center of the view. The disk of the Milky Way appears in the background. Other stars close to the Sun appear as variously colored points in the field. Image credit: NOIRLab / NSF / AURA / J. da Silva.

Astronomers Discover 38 New Cool Brown Dwarfs in Solar Neighborhood

Jan 15, 2021 by News Staff

Astronomers and citizen scientists from the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project have announced an unprecedented census of 525 L, T, and Y-type dwarfs within...

An artist’s rendition of the TOI-561 planetary system. Image credit: Adam Makarenko / W.M. Keck Observatory.

Astronomers Discover 10-Billion-Year-Old Multiplanet System

Jan 13, 2021 by Natali Anderson

Astronomers using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and the High Resolution Echelle Spectrometer on the Keck I telescope at the W. M. Keck...

This image from the eROSITA X-ray telescope shows the energetic Universe. As eROSITA scans the sky, the energy of the collected photons is measured with an accuracy ranging from 2% - 6%. To generate this image, in which the whole sky is projected onto an ellipse (so-called Aitoff projection) with the center of the Milky Way in the middle and the body of our Galaxy running horizontally, photons have been color-coded according to their energy (red for energies 0.3-0.6 keV, green for 0.6-1 keV, blue for 1-2.3 keV). The red diffuse glow away from the galactic plane is the emission of the hot gas in the vicinity of the Solar System (the Local Bubble). Along the plane itself, dust and gas absorb the lowest energy X-ray photons, so that only high-energy emitting sources can be seen, and their color appears blue in the image. The hotter gas close to the Galactic center, shown in green and yellow, carries imprinted the history of the most energetic processes in the life of the Milky Way, such as supernova explosions, driving fountains of gas out of the plane, and, possibly, past outburst from the now dormant supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way. Piercing through this turbulent, hot diffuse medium, are hundreds of thousands of X-ray sources, which appear mostly white in the image, and uniformly distributed over the sky. Among them, distant active galactic nuclei are visible as point sources, while clusters of galaxies reveal themselves as extended X-ray nebulosities. In total, about one million X-ray sources have been detected in this image. Image credit: Jeremy Sanders, Hermann Brunner & the eSASS team / Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics / Eugene Churazov & Marat Gilfanov, IKI.

Astronomers Detect Large-Scale X-Ray Bubbles in Milky Way’s Halo

Dec 31, 2020 by Enrico de Lazaro

Astronomers using the eROSITA X-ray telescope onboard the Spektrum-Roentgen-Gamma (SRG) observatory have detected X-ray-emitting bubbles that extend approximately...

The positions and orbits of the newly-discovered high-velocity stars. Image credit: Xiao Kong, China’s National Astronomical Observatories.

Almost Six Hundred New High-Velocity Stars Spotted in Milky Way

Dec 29, 2020 by Sergio Prostak

Using data from the Large Sky Area Multi-object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) and ESA’s star-mapping satellite Gaia, astronomers have discovered...

An artist’s impression of the super-Earth planet TOI-237b. Image credit: Sci-News.com.

TESS Discovers Two Small and Warm Exoplanets

Dec 14, 2020 by Natali Anderson

Astronomers using data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) have discovered two exoplanets transiting inactive red dwarf stars TOI-122...

Ankylosaurus magniventris, a large armored dinosaur species, witnesses the impact of an asteroid, falling on the Yucatan peninsula 66 million years ago. Image credit: Fabio Manucci.

Non-Marine Mass Extinctions Occur with Periodicity of 27.5 Million Years: Study

Dec 11, 2020 by News Staff

Non-marine animals (amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals) have apparently experienced at least 10 distinct episodes of intensified extinctions over...

An artist’s impression of what the Milky Way might look like seen from above. The colored rings show the rough extent of the Heracles galaxy. The yellow dot shows the position of the Sun. Image credit: Danny Horta-Darrington, Liverpool John Moores University / NASA / JPL-Caltech / SDSS.

Astronomers Find ‘Fossil Galaxy’ Hidden in Depths of Milky Way

Dec 8, 2020 by News Staff

A small satellite galaxy, named Heracles, collided with our Milky Way Galaxy about 10 billion years ago and its remnants account for about one third of...

Data from more than 1.8 billion stars have been used to create this map of the entire sky. It shows the total brightness and color of stars observed by ESA’s Gaia satellite and released as part of Gaia’s Early Data Release 3. Brighter regions represent denser concentrations of bright stars, while darker regions correspond to patches of the sky where fewer and fainter stars are observed. The color of the image is obtained by combining the total amount of light with the amount of blue and red light recorded by Gaia in each patch of the sky. The bright horizontal structure that dominates the image is the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy. It is actually a flattened disk seen edge-on that contains most of the Galaxy’s stars. In the middle of the image, the Galactic center appears bright, and thronged with stars. Darker regions across the Galactic plane correspond to foreground clouds of interstellar gas and dust, which absorb the light of more distant stars. Many of these clouds conceal stellar nurseries where new generations of stars are currently being born. Dotted across the image are also many globular and open clusters, as well as entire galaxies beyond our own. The two bright objects in the lower right of the image are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, two dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way. Image credit: ESA / Gaia / DPAC / CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO / A. Moitinho.

ESA’s Gaia Mission Releases Data on More Than 1.8 Billion Stars

Dec 3, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers from the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium released today the most detailed ever catalogue of Milky Way stars. The new data set,...

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