The distance to the North Polar Spur

One of the largest structures in the Milky Way galaxy, the North Polar Spur, was discovered at radio and X-ray wavelengths. The Spur is a giant ridge of bright emission that rises roughly perpendicularly out of the plane ...

Cold dust cores in the central zone of the Milky Way

The Milky Way's central molecular zone (CMZ) spans the innermost 1600 light-years of the galaxy (for comparison, the Sun is 26,600 light-years away from the galactic center) and includes a vast complex of molecular clouds ...

Rare blast's remains discovered in Milky Way's center

Astronomers may have found our galaxy's first example of an unusual kind of stellar explosion. This discovery, made with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, adds to the understanding of how some stars shatter and seed the universe ...

X-ray emission from dark matter

About eighty-five percent of the matter in the cosmos emits neither light nor any other known kind of radiation as far as is known, and hence is called dark matter. One of its other notable qualities is that it only interacts ...

Modeling galaxy formation

Understanding the formation and evolution of galaxies is difficult because so many different physical processes besides just gravity are involved, including processes associated with star formation and stellar radiation, ...

Astronomers discover first cloudless, Jupiter-like planet

Astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian have detected the first Jupiter-like planet without clouds or haze in its observable atmosphere. The findings were published this month in the Astrophysical ...

Galaxies hit single, doubles, and triple (growing black holes)

When three galaxies collide, what happens to the huge black holes at the centers of each? A new study using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and several other telescopes reveals new information about how many black holes ...

Coronal holes during the solar maximum

Sunspots were first seen by Galileo, and in the eighteenth century Rudolf Wolf concluded from his study of previous observations that there was a roughly eleven-year solar cycle of activity. In 1919 the astronomer George ...

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