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Milky Way

Artist’s impression of a hypervelocity star ejected from the Large Magellanic Cloud (shown on right). When a binary star system ventures too close to a supermassive black hole, the intense gravitational forces tear the pair apart. One star is captured into a tight orbit around the black hole, while the other is flung outward at extreme velocities—often exceeding thousands of kilometers per second—becoming a hypervelocity star. The inset illustration depicts this process: the original binary’s orbital path is shown as interwoven lines, with one star being captured by the black hole (near center of inset) while the other is ejected into space (lower right).

Runaway Stars Reveal Hidden Black Hole in Milky Way’s Nearest Neighbor

One of the few galaxies with a well-studied stellar halo is our neighbor, Andromeda, depicted here in the graphic. The reason Andromeda’s halo can be investigated so thoroughly is simply a matter of distance, both being close enough and bright enough that we can see the full picture with our current class of telescopes.

NASA’s Hubble Provides Bird’s-Eye View of Andromeda Galaxy’s Ecosystem

This artist's illustration depicts the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) in the foreground as it passes through the gaseous halo of the much larger Milky Way galaxy. The encounter has stripped away much of the LMC's spherical gas halo, leaving a trailing gas stream resembling a comet's tail. However, a compact halo remains intact, and scientists predict this residual halo will not dissipate entirely. The research team studied the LMC's halo by analyzing the light from 28 quasars, exceptionally bright active galactic nuclei that act as "lighthouse beacons" across the universe. This light enables scientists to detect the halo gas indirectly, as the gas absorbs some of the quasars' light. The lines in the illustration represent the path of the Hubble Space Telescope's observations, from its orbit around Earth to the distant quasars, passing through the LMC's gas halo.

Hubble Reveals Impact of Galaxy’s Close Encounter with Milky Way

This image shows the galaxy REBELS-25 as seen by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), overlaid on an infrared image of other stars and galaxies. The infrared image was taken by ESO’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA). In a recent study, researchers found evidence that REBELS-25 is a strongly rotating disc galaxy existing only 700 million years after the Big Bang. This makes it the most distant and earliest known Milky Way-like galaxy found to date.

Rebel Star: Ancient Galaxy Defies Time, Dances Like the Milky Way

This image shows two panels side by side. The right panel illustrates a spinning top precessing due to gravitational force. The left panel depicts the Galactic disk warp, which behaves similarly to the spinning top. The warp moves in a graceful pattern under the influence of the dark matter halo's gravitational pull. This illustration was created by HOU Kaiyuan and DONG Zhanxun from Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Milky Way’s Dark Matter Halo Shape Revealed by Galactic Disk Warp

galaxy seen from the side

Stars travel more slowly at Milky Way’s edge

Milky Way seen through a neutrino lens (blue)

The first neutrino image of our galaxy

Astronomers have released a gargantuan survey of the galactic plane of the Milky Way. The new dataset contains a staggering 3.32 billion celestial objects — arguably the largest such catalog so far. The data for this unprecedented survey were taken with the US Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera at the NSF’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of NOIRLab. The survey is here reproduced in 4000-pixels resolution to be accessible on smaller devices.

Gargantuan survey of the Milky Way reveals billions of celestial objects

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