News tagged with milky way
Hubble shows Milky Way is destined for head-on collision with Andromeda galaxy
(Phys.org) -- NASA astronomers announced Thursday they can now predict with certainty the next major cosmic event to affect our galaxy, sun, and solar system: the titanic collision of our Milky Way galaxy ...
May 31, 2012 |
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11.5 billion years old: Stellar archaeology traces Milky Way's history
(Phys.org) -- Unfortunately, stars don't have birth certificates. So, astronomers have a tough time figuring out their ages. Knowing a star's age is critical for understanding how our Milky Way galaxy built ...
May 30, 2012 |
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Ghostly gamma-ray beams blast from Milky Way's center
(Phys.org) -- As galaxies go, our Milky Way is pretty quiet. Active galaxies have cores that glow brightly, powered by supermassive black holes swallowing material, and often spit twin jets in opposite directions. ...
May 29, 2012 |
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A pinwheel in many colors
(Phys.org) -- This image of the Pinwheel Galaxy, or also known as M101, combines data in the infrared, visible, ultraviolet and X-rays from four of NASA's space-based telescopes. This multi-spectral view shows ...
May 25, 2012 |
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Nomads of the galaxy
A recent study proposes the galaxy is crowded with nomad planets adrift in space. If this is the case, nomad planets may play a dynamic role in the universe.
May 23, 2012 |
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Hubble spies edge-on beauty
(Phys.org) -- Visible in the constellation of Andromeda, NGC 891 is located approximately 30 million light-years away from Earth. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope turned its powerful wide field Advanced ...
May 21, 2012 |
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How nature shapes the birth of stars
(Phys.org) -- Using state of the art computer simulations, a team of astronomers from the University of Bonn in Germany have found the first evidence that the way in which stars form depends on their birth ...
May 11, 2012 |
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Free-floating planets in the Milky Way outnumber stars by factors of thousands
A few hundred thousand billion free-floating life-bearing Earth-sized planets may exist in the space between stars in the Milky Way. So argues an international team of scientists led by Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, Director ...
May 10, 2012 |
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VISTA views a vast ball of stars
(Phys.org) -- A new image of Messier 55 from ESO's VISTA infrared survey telescope shows tens of thousands of stars crowded together like a swarm of bees. Besides being packed into a relatively small space, ...
May 09, 2012 |
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Diagnosing a black hole flare
(Phys.org) -- Black holes can come in a wide range of masses. Some, with only about one solar mass, result from the supernova death of a massive star, while those at the center of galaxies (called supermassive ...
May 07, 2012 |
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TheSkyNet set to conquer more of our universe
In its ever-expanding quest to process astronomy data and discover much more of our Universe, theSkyNet has joined forces with the Pan-STARRS1 Science Consortium (PS1SC) to probe other galaxies beyond our own Milky Way.
May 03, 2012 |
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Rogue stars ejected from the galaxy are found in intergalactic space
It's very difficult to kick a star out of the galaxy.
Apr 30, 2012 |
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Old star, new trick
The Big Bang produced lots of hydrogen and helium and a smidgen of lithium. All heavier elements found on the periodic table have been produced by stars over the last 13.7 billion years. Astronomers analyze starlight to determine ...
Apr 30, 2012 |
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'Ridiculously' dim bevy of stars found beyond Milky Way
(Phys.org) -- A team of American, Canadian and Chilean astronomers have stumbled onto a remarkably faint cluster of stars orbiting the Milky Way that puts out as much light as only 120 modest Sun-like stars. ...
Apr 27, 2012 |
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Image: The Milky Way's 100 billion planets
(Phys.org) -- This artist's illustration gives an impression of how common planets are around the stars in the Milky Way. The planets, their orbits and their host stars are all vastly magnified compared to ...
Apr 26, 2012 |
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Milky Way
The Milky Way, or simply the Galaxy, is the galaxy in which the Solar System is located. It is a barred spiral galaxy that is part of the Local Group of galaxies. It is one of billions of galaxies in the observable universe.
Its name is a translation of the Latin Via Lactea, in turn translated from the Greek Γαλαξίας (Galaxias), referring to the pale band of light formed by the galactic plane as seen from Earth (see etymology of galaxy). Some sources hold that, strictly speaking, the term Milky Way should refer exclusively to the band of light that the galaxy forms in the night sky, while the galaxy should receive the full name Milky Way Galaxy, or alternatively the Galaxy. However, it is unclear how widespread this convention is, and the term Milky Way is routinely used in either context.
For more information about Milky Way, read the full article at
Wikipedia.
This text uses material from Wikipedia and is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
