The Gaia mission, launched by the European Space Agency, has completed a decade of groundbreaking astronomical observations, collecting over three trillion data points on two billion stars and ...

Conflicting distance measurements have added to the uncertainty. One data source places one object at 6,500 light years away, ...

A massive filament of gas and dust, designated X7, has been elongated during its long approach to the Milky Way galaxy's ...

Where is our solar system in the vast assemblage of celestial objects in this island Universe we call the Milky Way? To answer that question, we can begin with the beautiful configuration of stars we ...

Image of the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration "has ...

Exoplanets have captured the imagination of the public and scientists alike and as the search continues for more, researchers ...

Recent studies challenge the long-held belief that the Milky Way is a standard model for understanding galaxy formation, ...

The James Webb Space Telescope has captured a mid-infrared picture of Sagittarius A*, filling in a long-standing gap in observations..

Shapley determined that the Milky Way was 300,000 light years across ... His subsequent tuning-fork diagram of the shapes of galaxies remains a classic teaching tool for astronomers, and even though ...

Scientists are keen to get to the bottom of the dark matter puzzle because this phenomenon accounts for the vast majority of the "stuff" in the universe — about 85%, in fact. That means everything we ...

Image: CfA/Mel Weiss Astronomers have detected a mid-infrared flare from the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy for the very first time, and it’s shedding new light on ...

A perplexing "break" in a stream of stars around the Milky Way could be the result of dark matter — that is, if the mysterious cosmic stuff interacts with itself. The feature in question is in the ...