Latest Galactic astronomy Stories

April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online A team of astrophysicists from the Center for Astrophysics at the University of Notre Dame are exploring a discrepancy between the amount of lithium predicted by the standard models of elemental production during the Big Bang and the amount of lithium observed in the gas of the Small Magellanic Cloud. The Small Magellanic Cloud is a dwarf galaxy with a diameter of about 7,000 light-years.  It contains several hundred million...

Watch the Video: Simulation of Star Clusters Encounter Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The Hubble Space Telescope has been keeping its eyes fixed on two clusters full of massive stars that may be in the early stages of merging. The star clusters are about 170,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is a small satellite galaxy to our Milky Way. What was thought to have been just one cluster in the star-forming region commonly referred to as the...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers from Canada and the U.S. have found that the Milky Way galaxy may have recently had an encounter with one of its surrounding smaller satellite galaxies. “We have found evidence that our Milky Way had an encounter with a small galaxy or massive dark matter structure perhaps as recently as 100 million years ago,” Larry Widrow, professor at Queen’s University in Canada, said in a press release. “We clearly observe...

[ Watch the Video ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com According to a post by the European Research Media Center, the black hole in the center of our galaxy is about to meet up with a giant gas cloud in 2013. The celestial spectacle will provide astronomers with a prime front-row seat of Sagittarius A passing by a gas cloud at only 36 light-hours, or about 24 million miles. Although the distance between the two celestial objects seems far, it is extremely close in astronomical...

Unfortunately, stars don't have birth certificates. So, astronomers have a tough time figuring out their ages. Knowing a star's age is critical for understanding how our Milky Way galaxy built itself up over billions of years from smaller galaxies. Jason Kalirai of the Space Telescope Science Institute and The Johns Hopkins University's Center for Astrophysical Sciences, both in Baltimore, Md., has found the next best thing to a star's birth certificate. Using a new technique, Kalirai...

[ Video 1 ] | [ Video 2 ] A new image of the region surrounding the reflection nebula Messier 78, just to the north of Orion’s Belt, shows clouds of cosmic dust threaded through the nebula like a string of pearls. The observations, made with the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope[1], use the heat glow of interstellar dust grains to show astronomers where new stars are being formed. Dust may sound boring and uninteresting — the surface grime that hides the beauty of an...

It’s very difficult to kick a star out of the galaxy. In fact, the primary mechanism that astronomers have come up with that can give a star the two-million-plus mile-per-hour kick it takes requires a close encounter with the supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s core. So far astronomers have found 16 of these “hypervelocity” stars. Although they are traveling fast enough to eventually escape the galaxy’s gravitational grasp, they have been discovered while they are still...

"Black holes are very efficient eating machines… They can double their mass in less than a billion years. That may seem long by human standards, but over the history of the Galaxy it's pretty fast,” said Scott Kenyon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). New research presented by a joint team from the CfA and the University of Utah showed these super-massive star destroyers can balloon in size by absorbing one-half of a binary star system.  Binary star systems are...

Idan Ginsburg, a graduate student in Dartmouth's Department of Physics and Astronomy, studies some of the fastest moving objects in the cosmos. When stars and their orbiting plants wander too close to the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, their encounter with the black hole's gravitational force can either capture them or eject them from the galaxy, like a slingshot, at millions of miles per hour. Although their origin remains a mystery and although they are...

Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics researchers have determined that some planets are flying around in space at 30 million miles per hour. These hypervelocity planets are produced in the same way as the hypervelocity star that was found seven years ago traveling around the Milky Way Galaxy at 1.5 million miles per hour. "These warp-speed planets would be some of the fastest objects in our Galaxy," astrophysicist Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said in...