http://phys.org/ en-us Phys.org internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Physics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. These days the core of the Milky Way galaxy is a pretty tame place... cosmically speaking. The galactic black hole at the center is a sleeping giant. Existing stars are peacefully circling. Although conditions are favorable, there doesn't even seem to be much new star formation going on. http://phys.org/news281724537.html Space & Earth Wed, 06 Mar 2013 01:00:01 EST news281724537 Scientists looking to capture evidence of dark matter -- the invisible substance thought to constitute much of the universe -- may find a helpful tool in the recent work of researchers from Princeton University and New York University. http://phys.org/news235661576.html Physics Mon, 19 Sep 2011 14:33:23 EST news235661576 The signature spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy were likely formed by an epic collision between the Milky Way and the Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy, according to a University of Pittsburgh researcher and his collaborators, published today in the prestigious British journal Nature. http://phys.org/news235219073.html Space & Earth Wed, 14 Sep 2011 13:00:12 EST news235219073 (PhysOrg.com) -- Two studies appearing in the Aug. 25 issue of the journal Nature provide new insights into a cosmic accident that has been streaming X-rays toward Earth since late March. NASA's Swift satellite first alerted astronomers to intense and unusual high-energy flares from the new source in the constellation Draco. http://phys.org/news233412716.html Space & Earth Wed, 24 Aug 2011 13:52:31 EST news233412716 (PhysOrg.com) -- The center of our Milky Way galaxy is about 27,000 light-years away in the direction of the constellation of Sagittarius. At the very center of the galaxy lies a black hole whose mass is about four million solar masses. Around it is a donut-shaped structure about eight light-years across that rings the inner volume of neutral gas and an estimated thousands of individual stars. Around that, stretching out to 700 light-years, is a dense molecular zone of activity, unique to the galaxy, with massive star forming clusters of luminous stars, giant molecular clouds, and many more, poorly understood regions as well. http://phys.org/news232617066.html Space & Earth Mon, 15 Aug 2011 08:51:24 EST news232617066 Supermassive black holes - objects with masses of millions or even billions of suns - are found at the nuclei of galaxies. Our Milky Way galaxy, for example, has a massive black hole at its core, albeit one that is relatively quiescent. Despite their reputation for being implacable sinks for matter and energy, both radiation and matter can be ejected from the vicinity of a black hole, often in powerful jets, when it is ringed by a disk of matter and material accretes onto it. http://phys.org/news232014681.html Space & Earth Mon, 08 Aug 2011 09:32:22 EST news232014681 Danger looms from out of space: asteroids and comets are a threat to our planet. The history of Earth has always been punctuated by cosmic catastrophes. Several studies have claimed to have found periodic variations, with the probability of giant impacts increasing and decreasing in a regular pattern. Now a new analysis by Coryn Bailer-Jones from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) shows those simple periodic patterns to be statistical artifacts. His results indicate either that the Earth is as likely to suffer a major impact now as it was in the past, or that there has been a slight increase impact rate events over the past 250 million years. http://phys.org/news231409515.html Space & Earth Mon, 01 Aug 2011 09:27:07 EST news231409515 Even while construction of the James Webb Space Telescope is underway on the most advanced infrared vision of any space observatory, its technologies are already proving useful to human eye health here on Earth. http://phys.org/news231155829.html Space & Earth Fri, 29 Jul 2011 12:30:01 EST news231155829 (PhysOrg.com) -- Macquarie University PhD student Dimitri Douchin, and his adviser Orsola De Marco have played a pivotal role in the latest discovery of a new planetary nebula. http://phys.org/news230804100.html Space & Earth Mon, 25 Jul 2011 09:16:00 EST news230804100 (PhysOrg.com) -- Those aren't insects trapped in a spider's web -- they're stars in our own Milky Way galaxy, lying between us and another spiral galaxy called IC 342. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope captured this picture in infrared light, revealing the galaxy's bright patterns of dust. http://phys.org/news230443793.html Space & Earth Thu, 21 Jul 2011 05:10:57 EST news230443793 (PhysOrg.com) -- New observations from the Herschel Space Observatory show a bizarre, twisted ring of dense gas at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Only a few portions of the ring, which stretches across more than 600 light-years, were known before. Herschel's view reveals the entire ring for the first time, and a strange kink that has astronomers scratching their heads. http://phys.org/news230357252.html Space & Earth Wed, 20 Jul 2011 05:07:52 EST news230357252 (PhysOrg.com) -- Galaxies frequently collide with one another. Our own Milky Way galaxy, for example, and its nearest giant neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, are heading towards each other at a rate of about 120 kilometers per second; predictions claim the two will merge together in another four billion years or so. http://phys.org/news229607948.html Space & Earth Mon, 11 Jul 2011 12:59:26 EST news229607948 The largest digital camera ever built for a space mission has been painstakingly mosaicked together from 106 separate electronic detectors. The resulting "billion-pixel array" will serve as the super-sensitive 'eye' of ESA's Galaxy-mapping Gaia mission. http://phys.org/news229169170.html Space & Earth Wed, 06 Jul 2011 11:06:27 EST news229169170 (PhysOrg.com) -- Galaxies once thought of as voracious tigers are more like grazing cows, according to a new study using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. http://phys.org/news228671225.html Space & Earth Thu, 30 Jun 2011 16:47:22 EST news228671225 (PhysOrg.com) -- Our Milky Way galaxy, like other spiral galaxies, has a disk with sweeping arms of stars, gas, and dust that curve around the galaxy like the arms of a huge pinwheel. http://phys.org/news227180350.html Space & Earth Mon, 13 Jun 2011 10:39:32 EST news227180350 (PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, are shedding new light on some of the oldest parts of the Milky Way, suggesting life in the stellar nursery wasn't quite as simple as astronomers had thought. http://phys.org/news225971808.html Space & Earth Mon, 30 May 2011 10:57:07 EST news225971808 (PhysOrg.com) -- Five billion years from now, our Milky Way Galaxy will collide with the Andromeda Galaxy. This will mark a moment of both destruction and creation. The galaxies will lose their separate identities as they merge into one. At the same time, cosmic clouds of gas and dust will smash together, triggering the birth of new stars. http://phys.org/news225445960.html Space & Earth Wed, 25 May 2011 14:00:02 EST news225445960 (PhysOrg.com) -- In a surprising twist, if you will, Thomas Dame and Patrick Thaddeus, both of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, have put forth in a paper to be published in an upcoming issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters, the notion that a cluster of gas clouds they've discovered, that lies far from what is currently believed to be the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, is likely the extension of one of the great arms that form our galaxy. http://phys.org/news225359734.html Space & Earth Mon, 23 May 2011 08:56:20 EST news225359734 (PhysOrg.com) -- University of Notre Dame astronomer David Bennett is co-author of a new paper describing the discovery of a new class of planets -- dark, isolated Jupiter-mass bodies floating alone in space, far from any host star. Bennett and the team of astronomers involved in the discovery believe that the planets were most likely ejected from developing planetary systems. http://phys.org/news224941738.html Space & Earth Wed, 18 May 2011 13:00:25 EST news224941738 (PhysOrg.com) -- The galaxies in this cosmic pairing, captured by the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile, display some curious features, demonstrating that each member of the duo is close enough to feel the distorting gravitational influence of the other. The gravitational tug of war has warped the spiral shape of one galaxy, NGC 3169, and fragmented the dust lanes in its companion NGC 3166. Meanwhile, a third, smaller galaxy to the lower right, NGC 3165, has a front-row seat to the gravitational twisting and pulling of its bigger neighbours. http://phys.org/news222509278.html Space & Earth Wed, 20 Apr 2011 09:08:24 EST news222509278 The hypothetical dark flow seen in the movement of galaxy clusters requires that we can reliably identify a clear statistical correlation in the motion of distant objects which are, in any case, flowing outwards with the expansion of the universe and may also have their own individual (or peculiar) motion arising from gravitational interactions. http://phys.org/news220528321.html Space & Earth Mon, 28 Mar 2011 10:52:17 EST news220528321 (PhysOrg.com) -- NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, captured this image of a star-forming cloud of dust and gas, called Sh2-284, located in the constellation of Monoceros. Lining up along the edges of a cosmic hole are several "elephant trunks" -- or monstrous pillars of dense gas and dust. http://phys.org/news218706420.html Space & Earth Mon, 07 Mar 2011 07:47:16 EST news218706420 Physicists from UCLA and Japan have discovered evidence of "natural nuclear accelerators" at work in our Milky Way galaxy, based on an analysis of data from the world's largest cosmic ray detector. http://phys.org/news201279930.html Space & Earth Tue, 17 Aug 2010 16:05:58 EST news201279930 A surprising discovery that hydrogen gas clouds found in abundance in and above our Milky Way Galaxy have preferred locations has given astronomers a key clue about the origin of such clouds, which play an important part in galaxy evolution. http://phys.org/news194091268.html Space & Earth Wed, 26 May 2010 11:40:06 EST news194091268 (PhysOrg.com) -- Our Milky Way galaxy, like other spiral galaxies, has copious amounts of dust in its spiral arms. The dust absorbs starlight, thereby blocking our optical views, but at the same time it re-radiates the absorbed energy at far-infrared wavelengths. http://phys.org/news193925522.html Space & Earth Mon, 24 May 2010 13:12:16 EST news193925522 (PhysOrg.com) -- A new wide-field image released today by ESO displays many thousands of distant galaxies, and more particularly a large group belonging to the massive galaxy cluster known as Abell 315. As crowded as it may appear, this assembly of galaxies is only the proverbial "tip of the iceberg", as Abell 315 -- like most galaxy clusters -- is dominated by dark matter. The huge mass of this cluster deflects light from background galaxies, distorting their observed shapes slightly. http://phys.org/news192273964.html Space & Earth Wed, 05 May 2010 10:26:34 EST news192273964 (PhysOrg.com) -- NIRCam, the UA-designed infrared eye of the upcoming James Web Space Telescope, passed a key test and is on its way to the GoddardSpace Flight Center in Maryland. The telescope, designed to search for the earliest galaxies in the universe, is set for launch in 2014. http://phys.org/news192179773.html Space & Earth Tue, 04 May 2010 08:40:01 EST news192179773 (PhysOrg.com) -- Observations with Subaru Telescope's Prime Focus Camera (Suprime-Cam) have revealed an extended structure of the spiral galaxy Messier 81 (M81) that may hold a key to understanding the formation of galaxies. This structure could be M81's halo. Until now, ground-based telescopes have only observed individual stars in the haloes around the Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxies. Differences in M81's extended structure from the Milky Way's halo may point to variations in the formation histories of spiral galaxies. http://phys.org/news190360095.html Space & Earth Tue, 13 Apr 2010 06:48:32 EST news190360095 (PhysOrg.com) -- Mission engineers and scientists with NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer, a space telescope that has been beaming back pictures of galaxies for three times its design lifespan, are no longer planning science observations around one of its two ultraviolet detectors. http://phys.org/news190357207.html Space & Earth Tue, 13 Apr 2010 06:00:38 EST news190357207 (PhysOrg.com) --Almost 400,000 years after the universe was created in the big bang, matter cooled sufficiently for neutral atoms to form, thereby allowing the pervasive light to propagate almost completely unhindered. http://phys.org/news190311673.html Space & Earth Mon, 12 Apr 2010 17:50:03 EST news190311673