Conventional wisdom suggests that, like planets round the Sun, stars follow approximately circular orbits which cross the spiral arms, and that the Sun presently lies in a spur rather than a major spiral arm.
Astronomy
Mar 21, 2012
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NGC 4639 is a beautiful example of a type of galaxy known as a barred spiral. It lies over 70 million light-years away in the constellation of Virgo and is one of about 1,500 galaxies that make up the Virgo Cluster.
Astronomy
Oct 19, 2015
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(Phys.org) —In this new view of a vast star-forming cloud called W3, ESA's Herschel space observatory tells the story of how massive stars are born.
Astronomy
Mar 27, 2013
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76
New work from Carnegie's Alan Boss offers a potential solution to a longstanding problem in the prevailing theory of how rocky planets formed in our own Solar System, as well as in others. The snag he's untangling: how dust ...
Astronomy
Jun 25, 2015
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732
The universe is simply so vast that it can be difficult to maintain a sense of scale. Many galaxies we see through telescopes such as the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, the source of this beautiful image, look relatively ...
Astronomy
Nov 15, 2019
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Previous studies on the formation and evolution of spiral galaxies might have been based on an incorrect assumption, suggests a team of researchers of Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço (IA).
Astronomy
Aug 27, 2020
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300
(Phys.org)—The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured a beautiful galaxy that, with its reddish and yellow central area, looks rather like an explosion from a Hollywood movie. The galaxy, called NGC 5010, is in a ...
Astronomy
Nov 12, 2012
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(Phys.org)—Most big galaxies fit into one of two camps: pinwheel-shaped spiral galaxies and blobby elliptical galaxies. Spirals like the Milky Way are hip and happening places, with plenty of gas and dust to birth new stars. ...
Astronomy
Oct 22, 2012
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A spectacular new image released today by the European Southern Observatory gives us clues about how planets as massive as Jupiter could form. Using ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter ...
Astronomy
Jul 25, 2023
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Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is a typical barred spiral galaxy, a flattened disk of about a hundred billion stars, gas, and dust that is roughly one hundred thousand light-years in diameter. The galactic disk is surrounded ...
Astronomy
Dec 21, 2015
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