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That's scientists' latest estimate for our galaxy alone, based on Kepler data Roughly one out of every 37 to one out of every 70 sunlike stars in the sky might harbor an alien Earth, a new study reveals. These findings hint that billions of Earthlike planets might exist in our galaxy, researchers added. These new calculations are based on data from the Kepler space telescope, which in February wowed the globe by revealing more than 1,200 possible alien worlds, including 68 potentially Earth-size planets. The spacecraft does so by looking for the dimming that occurs when a world transits or...

A hundred million years ago, a triple-star system was traveling through the bustling center of our Milky Way galaxy when it made a life-changing misstep. The trio wandered too close to the galaxy's giant black hole, which captured one of the stars and hurled the other two out of the Milky Way. Adding to the stellar game of musical chairs, the two outbound stars merged to form a super-hot, blue star. This story may seem like science fiction, but astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope say it is the most likely scenario for a so-called hypervelocity star, known as HE...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – US astronomers have discovered a huge black hole, a million times the mass of the sun, in a nearby galaxy -- a finding that could help better understand the origins of the universe. The announcement Monday by the American Astronomical Society said the surprise discovery in a so-called "dwarf" galaxy offers evidence that black holes -- regions of space where not even light can escape -- formed before the buildup of galaxies. "This galaxy gives us important clues about a very early phase of galaxy evolution that has not been observed before," said Amy Reines, a researcher...

Astronomers have confirmed the first discovery of an alien planet in our Milky Way that came from another galaxy, they announced today (Nov. 18). The Jupiter-like planet orbits a star that was born in another galaxy and later captured by our own Milky Way sometime between 6 billion and 9 billion years ago, researchers said. A side effect of the galactic cannibalism brought a faraway planet within astronomers' reach for the first time ever. [Illustration of the extragalactic planet] "This is very exciting," said study co-author Rainer Klement of the Max-Planck-Institut fur Astronomie (MPIA) in Heidelberg, Germany. "We have no...

Displayed in all their exquisite detail, six spectacular galaxies are pictured more clearly that they ever have before. All of them are beautiful examples of spiral galaxies and were captured in images from ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. The pictures were taken in infrared light, using the impressive power of the HAWK-I camera, and will help astronomers understand how the remarkable spiral patterns in galaxies form and evolve.-incredible-new-detail.html#ixzz13uAfNijg

Nasa man expects first prototype of a spaceship that will take us between worlds ‘within a few years’The US space agency Nasa has announced an intriguing new project called the 'Hundred Year Starship' which aims to send humans on a one-way trip to newly discovered planets across the galaxy. "The human space programme is now really aimed at settling other worlds," said Pete Worden, director of Nasa'a Ames research laboratory, at a seminar in San Francisco. "Twenty years ago you had to whisper that in dark bars [or] get fired." The Ames laboratory is responsible for Pioneer 10, the...

PARIS (AFP) – European astrophysicists said on Wednesday they could settle a mystery about how galaxies crank up in size, developing from proto-structures in the early Universe to the billion-star behemoths of today. Analysis of ancient light, known as redshift, indicates that the first galaxies were formed nearly 13 billion years ago, about a billion years after the "Big Bang" that created the Universe. They then dramatically fattened up to become the giant systems we see today, and the question is why. Until now, many experts believed that galaxies increased in size by colliding with others, in the same way...

Black-hole Located in the Cancer constellation about 3.5 billion light years away, an object dubbed OJ287 is part of a binary black hole system and produces a huge amount of light, fact that is usually associated with the formation of a new galaxy. Quasars mostly consist of a massive black hole, surrounded by a large accretion disk spinning around it, and are powered by the massive amounts of matter falling towards the black hole at its center. Although compacted into objects with a small size, during the feeding process quasars release enough energy to outshine an entire galaxy. OJ 287...

The most recent supernova in our Galaxy has been discovered by tracking the rapid expansion of its remains. This result, using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and NRAO's Very Large Array (VLA), has implications for understanding how often supernovas explode in the Milky Way galaxy. The supernova explosion occurred about 140 years ago, making it the most recent supernova in the Milky Way as measured in Earth's time frame. Previously, the last known galactic supernova occurred around 1680, based on studying the expansion of its remnant Cassiopeia A. The recent supernova explosion was not seen in optical light about 140 years...

One wonders... Did the inhabitants of galaxy NGC 891 duck when Comet McNaught flew past the edge-on spiral on the morning of June 8th? Mike O'Connor and Tristan Dilapo took this picture of the cosmic close encounter from Colden, New York: (click on photo to enlarge) "The comet was only 10 degrees above the horizon," says O'Connor. "Nevertheless, we got a good picture using a 12-inch telescope and an SBIG ST9-E camera."And, no, the denizens of that distant galaxy did not flinch, flee, duck or take notice in any way. NGC 891 is 30 million light years away, far removed...

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has reached back 13.2 billion years -- farther than ever before in time and space -- to reveal a "primordial population" of galaxies never seen before. "The deeper Hubble looks into space, the farther back in time it looks, because light takes billions of years to cross the observable universe," the Space Telescope Science Institute said in a statement released Tuesday. "This makes Hubble a powerful 'time machine' that allows astronomers to see galaxies as they were 13 billion years ago -- just 600 million to 800 million years after the Big Bang," the institute said...

A new image of the bulge at the center of a distant spiral galaxy, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, is giving astronomers insight into how these galactic paunches form. The image of NGC 4710 is part of a survey that astronomers have conducted to learn more about the formation of bulges, which are a substantial component of most spiral galaxies. When targeting spiral galaxy bulges, astronomers often seek edge-on galaxies, as their bulges are more easily distinguishable from the disc. The detailed edge-on view of NGC 4710, taken with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys, shows the galaxy's bulge in...

Bright Nebulae of M33 Credit & Copyright: Ken Crawford (Rancho Del Sol Observatory) Explanation: Gorgeous spiral galaxy M33 seems to have more than its fair share of bright emission nebulae. In fact, narrow-band and broad-band image data are combined in this beautifully detailed composite to trace the reddish emission nebulae, star forming HII regions, sprawling along loose spiral arms that wind toward the galaxy's core. Historically of great interest to astronomers, M33's giant HII regions are some of the largest known stellar nurseries - sites of the formation of short-lived but very massive stars. Intense ultraviolet radiation from the...

Oct 7, 2009 — Saturn has a newly-discovered ring to add to its decor – the largest of all. It’s so big, it makes Saturn look like a speck in the middle of it. The ring, located at the orbit of the small outer moon Phoebe, is inclined 27 degrees and revolves backwards around Saturn. This was announced today by...

Stephen Hawking believes that one of the major factors in the possible scarcity of intelligent life in our galaxy is the high probability of an asteroid or comet colliding with inhabited planets. We have observed, Hawking points out in Life in the Universe, the collision of a comet, Schumacher-Levi, with Jupiter (below), which produced a series of enormous fireballs, plumes many thousands of kilometers high, hot "bubbles" of gas in the atmosphere, and large dark "scars" on the atmosphere which had lifetimes on the order of weeks. It is thought the collision of a rather smaller body with the Earth,...

A LARGE satellite galaxy may be lurking, hidden from view, next door to our own. Sukanya Chakrabarti and Leo Blitz of the University of California, Berkeley, suspected that the gravity of a nearby galaxy was causing perturbations that have been observed in gas on the fringes of the Milky Way. "We did a large range of simulations where we varied the mass of the perturber and the distance of closest approach," says Chakrabarti. In the best-fitting simulation, the unseen galaxy has about 1 per cent of the Milky Way's mass, or 10 billion times the mass of the sun. That's...

The European Space Agency (Esa) has released a stunning image of the spiral galaxy M51, otherwise known as the Whirlpool Galaxy. It is a composite of images taken by Europe's Herschel space observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope. The picture combines views of the galaxy captured at visible and far-infrared wavelengths.

Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party

The Milky Way, sometimes called simply the Galaxy, is the galaxy in which our Solar System is located. It is a barred spiral galaxy that is part of the Local Group of galaxies. It is one of billions of galaxies in the observable universe. Its name is a translation of the Latin Via Lactea, which derives from the Greek Γαλαξίας (Galaxias or Galaxiases), both of which refer to the pale band of light formed by the galactic plane as seen from Earth (see etymology of galaxy). Some sources hold that, strictly speaking, the term Milky Way should refer exclusively to...

A jet of gas spewing from a huge black hole has mysteriously brightened, flaring to 90 times its normal glow. For seven years the Hubble Space Telescope has been watching the jet, which pours out of the supermassive black hole in the center of the M87 galaxy. It has photographed the strange phenomenon fading and then brightening, with a peak that even outshines M87's brilliant core. Scientists have dubbed the enigmatic bright blob HST-1, and are so far at a loss to explain its weird behavior. "I did not expect the jet in M87 or any other jet powered by...