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Astronomers unveiled today what they are calling the best map ever produced of the Milky Way galaxy. The new view shows our spiral galaxy as it would look face-on to a very distant observer. The map is based on findings about the structural evolution of the Milky Way presented this week at the 212th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in St. Louis, Missouri. Robert Benjamin of the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater was among the scientists who presented results at a briefing today with reporters. The researchers determined that the Milky Way actually has two fewer major arms than previously believed....

ST. LOUIS — As if in a cosmic hug, the spiral arms of some galaxies wrap around themselves more tightly than others. The key to the bear hug: Galaxies holding heftier black holes at their centers also have more tightly wound spiral arms, an astronomer announced today. The finding gives astronomers a way to weigh so-called supermassive black holes, which can have masses of millions to billions that of the sun, and are thought to reside at the centers of galaxies. "This is a really easy way to determine the masses of these super-massive black holes at the centers of...

Astronomers have glimpsed what may be the farthest galaxy we've ever seen, providing a picture of a baby galaxy born soon after the beginning of the universe. Images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope have revealed the galaxy at almost 13 billion light-years away, making it the strongest candidate for the most distant galaxy ever seen, said European Southern Observatory astronomer Piero Rosati, who helped make the discovery. Since the galaxy is so far away, its light took ages to reach us, so what we see now is a snapshot of how this galaxy looked 13 billion years ago. At...

A young star speeding away from the Milky Way is in fact an alien visitor, astronomers have confirmed. The wayward object is one of several rogues that are giving astronomers a glimpse into the volatile nature of our galaxy and others. Astronomers have found about 10 stars hurtling away from our galaxy, at speeds that exceed its gravitational grasp. While most stars rush through space at speeds on the order of hundreds of kilometers per second, these aptly-named "hypervelocity stars" are rocketing away at least twice as fast. Most of these speedy stars are thought to be exiles from the...

A mushroom-shaped hydrogen cloud rearing 1000 light years above the plane of our galaxy is the aftermath of a massive gas cloud that dive-bombed the Milky Way, new computer simulations suggest. The work explains why the cloud is unlike any other found so far. The cloud, called GW 123.4-1.5, was discovered in 1999 by Jayanne English of the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, and colleagues, who found it in a radio survey of the galactic plane. Two explanations for its familiar shape were offered at the time – that the mushroom is a bubble of gas blown out by...

For the first time astronomers have witnessed a supermassive black hole blasting its galactic neighbor with a deadly beam of energy.The "death star galaxy," as NASA astronomers called it, could obliterate the atmospheres of planets but also trigger the birth of stars in its wake of its destructive beam. Fortunately, the cosmic violence is a safe distance from our own neck of the cosmos."We've seen many jets produced by black holes, but this is the first time we've seen one punch into another galaxy like we're seeing here," said Dan Evans, astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge,...

Black holes are weird. Well, duh, right? But they do something that surprises most people: besides hoovering down almost everything nearby, they can also eject material as well. And by eject, I mean send it out screaming at nearly the speed of light and heated to a bazillion degrees. Picture from Chandra of the active galaxy pair 3C321 The image above is from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, and it’s all about this scary scenario. Let’s take a walk down the gravity well, shall we? Basically, as matter swirls down into the maw of the hole, it forms a flattened disk...

With cannons of confetti exploding around him, David Beckham officially arrived in Los Angeles today with the difficult mission of raising soccer's profile in this country to a new, higher level. Looking cool in a gray suit and tie while those around him wilted in the heat, Beckham stood at a podium set up on the field at the Home Depot Center in Carson and met his public with waves and smiles. His wife, pop star Victoria (Posh Spice) Beckham, sat in a folding chair and gazed adoringly at her husband, also impervious to the heat in a bright fuchsia...

An international team of astronomers have conclusive new evidence that a recently discovered "dark galaxy" is, in fact, an object the size of a galaxy, made entirely of dark matter. Although the object, named VIRGOHI21, has been observed since 2000, astronomers have been slowly ruling out every alternative explanation. In a new research paper, entitled 21-cm synthesis observations of VIRGOHI 21 – a possible dark galaxy in the Virgo Cluster, researchers provide updated evidence about this mysterious galaxy. They have now performed a high resolution observations of VIRGOHI21 using the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT), to better pin down the...

The Sombrero Galaxy appears to hover in space like a glowing UFO in a new composite image made from three of NASA's Great Observatories. Data from a trio of space telescopes – Chandra, Spitzer and Hubble – have been combined to produce the new image. Chandra observations reveal hot gas that glows in X rays and extends about 60,000 light years from the centre of the galaxy, which itself is only 50,000 light years wide. The gas is probably being blown outwards by a wind driven by supernova explosions in the galaxy.

Science Daily — The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has delivered an unrivalled snapshot of the nearby barred spiral galaxy NGC 1672. This remarkable image provides a high definition view of the galaxy’s large bar, its fields of star-forming clouds and dark bands of interstellar dust.

It seems that Abell 400, a galaxy cluster that has long enchanted astronomers, is provoking a new round of speculations, with little regard for the separation of fact and fiction. The picture above combines X-ray and radio images of the galaxy cluster Abell 400. According to the press release from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, the composite "shows radio jets immersed in a vast cloud of multimillion degree X-ray emitting gas that pervades the cluster." "The jets emanate from the vicinity of two supermassive black holes (bright spots in the image)…. The peculiar dumbbell structure of this galaxy is thought to...

Early Large Spiral Galaxy Resembles Milky Way    08/18/2006   Astronomers using adaptive optics at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Paranal, Chile took spectra of a galaxy at red-shift 2.38 described as an “early young galaxy” that must have, according to current theory, formed very rapidly, because it looks like the Milky Way.  The observations by Genzel et al., published in Nature,1 were described by Robert C. Kennicutt (editor of Astrophysical Journal) in the same issue of Nature2 this way: On page 786 of this issue1, Genzel et al. present remarkable observations of what appears to be a...

An image taken in 2001 with the Hubble Space Telescope reveals the irregular-shaped galaxy ESO 510-13, which astronomers theorize is twisted because of gravitational effects that occurred when it absorbed a smaller galaxy. Image credit: NASA and Hubble Heritage Team

Astronomers have found that a diffuse X-ray glow in our galaxy is not generated by hot gas but rather it's radiating from old stars that have yet to be counted. There could be roughly a billion stars we didn't know about in the Milky Way, they said Wednesday. The discovery, if confirmed, "would have a profound impact on our understanding of the history of our galaxy, from star-formation and supernova rates to stellar evolution," according to a statement released by NASA.

After creating the most detailed analysis yet of what the Milky Way looks like, astronomers say a long bar of stars cuts on an angle through the center of the galaxy that includes the sun and planet Earth. Some scientists have suspected the presence of the stellar bar, but the survey led by two Wisconsin astronomers shows the bar is far longer than previously believed, and at a specific angle. The skinny bar is made up of old and red stars and is about 27,000 light years in length, about 7,000 light years longer than previously believed. The bar is...

The Milky Way is not a perfect spiral galaxy but instead sports a long bar through its centre, according to new infrared observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Galaxies come in a wide variety of shapes usually thought to be produced by gravitational interactions with nearby objects. Some spiral galaxies look like pinwheels, with their arms curving out from a central bulge, while others have a straight bar at their centres. Radio telescopes detected gas that hinted at a bar at the heart of the Milky Way in the late 1980s. A decade later, observations with the near infrared survey...

FORT DIX, N.J. (AFPN) -- C-5 Galaxy aircrews must tape over some white lights in the cockpit of their huge aircraft before missions into a “blacked out” environment when they must use night vision goggles. Sometimes crews use flashlights or even pull circuit breakers and light bulbs for other light systems to minimize the visual “wash out” effects lights have on their sensitive goggles. Then Air Mobility Battlelab innovators here came up with a solution. This week, command officials at Scott Air Force Base, Ill., approved use of the C-5 Aviator Night Vision Lighting system. This is a portable “clip-on”...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Andromeda galaxy just got bigger -- three times bigger, astronomers said on Monday. The galaxy is not actually expanding. But new measurements suggest that the nearest galaxy to our own Milky Way is three times broader than astronomers had thought. They now believe a thin sprinkling of stars once thought to be a halo is in fact part of Andromeda's main disk. That makes the spiral galaxy, so close to Earth that it appeared as a fuzzy blob to the ancients, more than 220,000 light-years across -- triple the previous estimate of 70,000 to 80,000 light-years....

Starring: Martin Freeman, Sam Rockwell, Mos Def, Zooey Deschanel, Bill Nighy, Anna Chancellor, John Malkovich, Warwick Davis, Alan Rickman (voice), Stephen Fry (voice) It opens with a perfectly choreographed dolphin musical number, and ends with the disembodied head of deceased author Douglas Adams. This is the long awaited adaptation of his novel, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” and as the dolphins flawlessly perform their rendition of “So Long and Thanks for All the Fish” you’ll realize you’re in for one hell of a ride. Don’t panic. It only gets a little weirder.