The Milky Way is not alone in its neighborhood. It has captured smaller galaxies in its orbit, and the two largest are known as the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, visible as twin dusty smears in the Southern Hemisphere.
Astronomy
Sep 9, 2020
10
729
One day, humankind may step foot on another habitable planet. That planet may look very different from Earth, but one thing will feel familiar—the rain.
Astronomy
Apr 5, 2021
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4538
Two decades of monitoring from W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea in Hawaiʻi reveals a peculiar cloud dubbed X7 being pulled apart as it accelerates toward the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.
Astronomy
Feb 21, 2023
178
502
A stunning image captured by researchers at The Australian National University (ANU) and Australia's national science agency, CSIRO, shows one of the Milky Way's closest neighbors in new detail.
Astronomy
Dec 17, 2021
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404
In a first-of-its-kind observation, researchers from the University of New Hampshire Space Science Center have documented a unique event that occurs in clouds before a lightning flash happens. Their observation, called "fast ...
Earth Sciences
Apr 10, 2019
19
335
Astronomers accidentally discovered the footprints of a monster galaxy in the early universe that has never been seen before. Like a cosmic Yeti, the scientific community generally regarded these galaxies as folklore, given ...
Astronomy
Oct 22, 2019
5
1154
About 3.5 million years ago, the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy unleashed an enormous burst of energy. Our primitive ancestors, already afoot on the African plains, likely would have witnessed ...
Astronomy
Jun 2, 2020
7
8992
Dark clouds, the smell of rain on a hot sidewalk, the flashes of intense light followed by a loud crackling and then a low, rolling thunder—who doesn't love a good summer thunderstorm? We've all seen one, heard one, or ...
Space Exploration
Jan 20, 2021
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8820
We know that the birthplaces of stars are large molecular clouds of gas and dust found in space.
Astronomy
May 11, 2018
4
540
It's hard to imagine a more inhospitable world than our closest planetary neighbor. With an atmosphere thick with carbon dioxide, and a surface hot enough to melt lead, Venus is a scorched and suffocating wasteland where ...
Planetary Sciences
Dec 20, 2021
1
470
