Gaia has charted the cosmos since 2014, creating a vast encyclopedia of the positions and movements of celestial objects in our Milky Way and beyond. It is difficult to capture the breadth of ...

A cosmic anomaly detected in a distant galaxy could portend a terrifying future for life in the Milky Way. The discovery suggests that our models of galactic evolution could be inaccurate.

A terrifying glimpse at one potential fate of our Milky Way galaxy has come to light thanks to the discovery of a cosmic anomaly that challenges our understanding of the universe. An international ...

The Radcliffe wave. The clouds that comprise this structure are highlighted in red and superimposed on an artist’s illustration of the Milky Way. The location of the Sun is highlighted by the yellow ...

All good things come to an end—even the Milky Way. Our home galaxy’s demise isn’t estimated to occur for at least another 4 or 5 billion years, when astronomers believe it will start ...

Ancient Greek philosophers debated the Milky Way’s nature, with some attributing it to celestial fires and others viewing it as a dense cluster of distant stars. Credit: Ale RaFlo, CC BY-SA 4.0 via ...

Our sun and the planets that circle it are part of a galaxy called the Milky Way. Its name comes from the Greek galaxias ...

For comparison, the supermassive black hole in the Milky Way has about 4 million solar masses. Elsewhere in the universe, there are supermassive black holes with billions of times more mass than ...

The black hole at the Milky Way’s heart neither slumbers nor sleeps. Instead, the ring of plasma surrounding it flickers constantly, punctuated by superbright flares, observations show.

Astronomers have uncovered compelling evidence of the closest supermassive black hole outside of our own Milky Way galaxy. Nestled within the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), one of our nearest galactic ...