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The Milky Way galaxy is at least 50 percent larger than is commonly estimated, according to new findings that reveal that the galactic disk is contoured into several concentric ripples. The research, conducted by an international team led by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Professor Heidi Jo Newberg, revisits astronomical data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey which, in 2002, established the presence of a bulging ring of stars beyond the known plane of the Milky Way. "In essence, what we found is that the disk of the Milky Way isn't just a disk of stars in a flat plane—it's corrugated," said...

Explanation: What happens when a star runs out of nuclear fuel? For stars about the mass of our Sun, the center condenses into a white dwarf while the outer atmospheric layers are expelled into space and appear as a planetary nebula. This particular planetary nebula, pictured above and designated Shapley 1 after the famous astronomer Harlow Shapley, has a very apparent annular ring like structure. Although some of these nebulas appear like planets on the sky (hence their name), they actually surround stars far outside our Solar System.

Astronomers have determined the density and speed of dark matter in our corner of the universe. The finding helps bring dark matter out of the realm of the hypothetical and places scientists a few steps to closer figuring out what this invisible stuff that pervades the universe and holds galaxies together is made of. It also settles once and for all the question of which galaxy—our Milky Way or Andromeda—is more massive. The winner: The Milky Way.

Explanation: How big is our universe? This question, among others, was debated by two leading astronomers in 1920 in what has since become known as astronomy's Great Debate. Many astronomers then believed that our Milky Way Galaxy was the entire universe. Many others, though, believed that our galaxy was just one of many. In the Great Debate, each argument was detailed, but no consensus was reached. The answer came over three years later with the detected variation of single spot in the Andromeda Nebula, as shown on the original glass discovery plate digitally reproduced here. When Edwin Hubble compared images,...

A super high resolution image by Hubble of the Andromeda Galaxy. Zooms in to show individual stars. An incredible video that shows the vastness of our nearest neighbor galaxy. Music by Koda - The Last Stand.

Explanation: Will our Milky Way Galaxy collide one day with its larger neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy? Most likely, yes. Careful plotting of slight displacements of M31's stars relative to background galaxies on recent Hubble Space Telescope images indicate that the center of M31 could be on a direct collision course with the center of our home galaxy. Still, the errors in sideways velocity appear sufficiently large to admit a good chance that the central parts of the two galaxies will miss, slightly, but will become close enough for their outer halos to become gravitationally entangled. Once that happens, the two...

Explanation: How far can you see? The Andromeda Galaxy, 2.5 million light years away, is the most distant object easily seen by the unaided eye. Other denizens of the night sky, like stars, clusters, and nebulae, are typically hundreds to thousands of light-years distant. That's far beyond the Solar System but well within our own Milky Way Galaxy. Also known as M31, the external galaxy poses directly above a chimney in this well-planned deep night skyscape from an old mine in southern Portugal. The image was captured in a single exposure tracking the sky, so the foreground is slightly blurred...

Explanation: Three very different -- and very famous -- objects were all captured in a single frame last month. On the upper left is the bright blue Pleiades, perhaps the most famous cluster of stars on the night sky. The Pleiades (M45) is about 450 light years away and easily found a few degrees from Orion. On the upper right is the expansive Andromeda Galaxy, perhaps the most famous galaxy -- external to our own -- on the night sky. Andromeda (M31) is one of few objects visible to the unaided eye where you can see light that is millions...

NASA scientists have spotted what they are calling a “halo” around Andromeda. The halo, which is more like a huge bloom of plasma, stretches 1.3 million light-years into space. That’s roughly halfway to our own galaxy, which is an impressive feat. We often think of galaxies as self-contained collections of stars, planets, and gasses, but that’s simply not the case. The effects of a galaxy extend far beyond their outer edge. In fact, the line between the edge of a galaxy and empty space is so blurred that there’s hardly a real “edge” at all. In the case of Andromeda,...

The Milky Way had a previously unknown big sibling that was torn apart by the neighboring Andromeda galaxy long ago, a new study suggests. Andromeda and the Milky Way are the two largest members of the Local Group, a collection of more than 50 galaxies packed into a dumbbell-shaped region of space about 10 million light-years across. Andromeda was not kind to the onetime third-biggest member of this family, devouring it about 2 billion years ago, according to the new research. "Astronomers have been studying the Local Group — the Milky Way, Andromeda and their companions — for so long,"...

Southern Hemisphere stargazers have it good. From anywhere on Earth, on a very dark night, the band of the Milky Way can be seen to stretch across the sky in a sideways view through the disk of our spiral galaxy. From the southern hemisphere we can also see the part of the band where it widens into a bright bulge of stars, veiled by lanes of dust, surrounding the supermassive black hole at the very core of the galaxy. Also from the south, due to the orientation of the Earth and the Solar System, we can see the Large and...

The Milky Way, just like every galaxy in the cosmos, moves. While everything in the universe is constantly moving because the universe itself is expanding, since the 1970s astronomers have known of an additional motion, called peculiar velocity. This is a different sort of flow that we seem to be caught in. The Local Group of galaxies — a collection that includes the Milky Way, Andromeda and a few dozen smaller galactic companions — moves at about 600 kilometers per second with respect to the leftover radiation from the Big Bang. Over the past few decades, astronomers have tallied up...

Mass Effect: Andromeda’s Racist Game Designer No Longer Works For BioWare One of the most controversial individuals who worked at BioWare on Mass Effect: Andromeda was Manveer Heir, a game designer on the project. He had mentioned recently on his Twitter profile that Mass Effect: Andromeda was one of his past projects, but now we have confirmation that Manveer Heir is no longer working at BioWare. BioWare general manager Aaryn Flynn responded to a comment on Twitter about Heir’s employment at BioWare, stating the following… /snip If you check Manveer Heir’s Twitter profile you can see that he does indeed...

Long before Google announced the Pixel phones, and even before we knew they would be called "Pixel," we heard about the Nexus Launcher. That mysterious new home screen from Google eventually became the Pixel Launcher, and now it's official as part of the Pixel and Pixel XL. However, Google has confirmed that the Pixel Launcher will be exclusive to its namesake phone, at least for a while. The Pixel Launcher includes a new Google search "pill" widget and a display for the date/weather. The app drawer has been revamped as well. You swipe up to open it from the favorite tray at...

Google’s new OS is expected to bring some of the desktop-like capabilities of Chrome into Android to form a super OS that will be able to compete directly with Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Veteran fans of thriller author Michael Crichton may recall that his career kicked into high gear with the 1969 release of a novel entitled “The Andromeda Strain.” The book described the impact of a deadly microbe strain delivered to earth from space via a military satellite.Tomorrow in San Francisco, Google is expected to announce the release of a new strain of operating system code-named “Andromeda.”...

Sharpest ever view of the Andromeda Galaxy This image, captured with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, is the largest and sharpest image ever taken of the Andromeda galaxy -- otherwise known as M31.This is a cropped version of the full image and has 1.5 billion pixels. You would need more than 600 HD television screens to display the whole image.It is the biggest Hubble image ever released and shows over 100 million stars and thousands of star clusters embedded in a section of the galaxy's pancake-shaped disc stretching across over 40 000 light-years.This image is too large to be easily...

Explanation: This sharp telescopic field of view holds two bright galaxies. Barred spiral NGC 5101 (top right) and nearly edge-on system NGC 5078 are separated on the sky by about 0.5 degrees or about the apparent width of a full moon. Found within the boundaries of the serpentine constellation Hydra, both are estimated to be around 90 million light-years away and similar in size to our own large Milky Way galaxy. In fact, if they both lie at the same distance their projected separation would be only 800,000 light-years or so. That's easily less than half the distance between the...

Explanation: What’s that rising over the hill? A galaxy. Never having seen a galaxy themselves, three friends of an industrious astrophotographer experienced an exhilarating night sky firsthand that featured not only the band of our Milky Way galaxy but also Milky Way's neighbor -- the Andromeda galaxy. Capturing the scene required careful pre-shot planning including finding a good site, waiting for good weather, balancing relative angular sizes with a zoom lens, managing ground lighting, and minimizing atmospheric light absorption. The calculated shot therefore placed the friends on a hill about 250 meters away and about 50 meters up. The featured...

Explanation: Why would the sky glow like a giant repeating rainbow? Airglow. Now air glows all of the time, but it is usually hard to see. A disturbance however -- like an approaching storm -- may cause noticeable rippling in the Earth's atmosphere. These gravity waves are oscillations in air analogous to those created when a rock is thrown in calm water. The long-duration exposure nearly along the vertical walls of airglow likely made the undulating structure particularly visible. OK, but where do the colors originate? The deep red glow likely originates from OH molecules about 87-kilometers high, excited by...

Explanation: A mere 2.5 million light-years away, the Andromeda Galaxy, also known as M31, really is just next door as large galaxies go. In this (inset) scan, image data from NASA's Nuclear Spectrosopic Telescope Array has yielded the best high-energy X-ray view yet of our large neighboring spiral, revealing some 40 extreme sources of X-rays, X-ray binary star systems that contain a black hole or neutron star orbiting a more normal stellar companion. In fact, larger Andromeda and our own Milky Way are the most massive members of the local galaxy group. Andromeda is close enough that NuSTAR can examine...