If you’re swimming in a large volume of water, i’s difficult to judge the properties of distant floating objects with exacting precision, and the same is true for our star system as it swirls around the galaxy. This is perhaps … Read More
The Andromeda Galaxy is a giant swirl of around a trillion stars just down the street from the Milky Way. But billions of years from now, it will collide with our home galaxy. On a clear night away from city … Read More
Imaged by the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii, the galaxies NGC 5394 (the smaller one, on the right) and NGC 5395 (the larger one, on the left) are in the middle of colliding over the span of millions of years. It … Read More
NASA’s latest image of the Milky Way is two decades in the making. The dramatic view of the heart of the galaxy combines 370 observations taken over a period of 20 years and features billions of stars. “What we see in the … Read More
Note: No screencap does the thing justice; you’ll have to go to the website and play space ranger on your own. However, clicking the ‘Take a Tour’ button in the upper left corner is a good place to start. 100,000 … Read More
Our home galaxy is not the thin, clean spiral we had envisioned. Researchers created the first 3D map of the Milky Way galaxy and figured out what makes it warped and twisted. So, we now know that the Milky Way … Read More