Gaia Finds Hundreds of Asteroid Moons
The amazing Gaia mission to chart stars in the Milky Way Galaxy is also an expert asteroid hunter. Now, astronomers are reporting its success at spotting more moons of asteroids in our solar system. Once the Gaia data from its release 3 are confirmed, those observations will add 352 more binary asteroids to the known…
Gaia Hit by a Micrometeoroid AND Caught in a Solar Storm
For over ten years, the ESA’s Gaia Observatory has monitored the proper motion, luminosity, temperature, and composition of over a billion stars throughout our Milky Way galaxy and beyond. This data will be used to construct the largest and most precise 3D map of the cosmos ever made and provide insight into the origins, structure,…
Mapping the Milky Way’s Dark Matter Halo
Anytime astronomers talk of mapping the Milky Way I am always reminded how tricky the study of the Universe can be. After all, we live inside the Milky Way and working out what it looks like or mapping it from the inside is not the easiest of missions. It’s one thing to map the visible…
The Milky Way’s Last Merger Event Was More Recent Than Thought
The Milky Way is only as massive as it is because of collisions and mergers with other galaxies. This is a messy process, and we see the same thing happening with other galaxies throughout the Universe. Currently, we see the Milky Way nibbling at its two satellite galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. Their…
How the Webb and Gaia missions bring a new perspective on...
Enlarge / NASA's James Webb Space Telescope reveals the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth. In a feat of galactic archeology, astronomers are using ever more detailed information to trace the origin of our galaxy—and to learn about how other galaxies formed in the early stages of the Universe. Using powerful…
There’s Another, More Boring Explanation for those Dyson Sphere Candidate Stars
Dyson Spheres have been a tantalising digression in the hunt for alien intelligence. Just recently seven stars have been identified as potential candidates with most of their radiation given off in the infrared wavelengths. Potentially this is the signature of heat from a matrix of spacecraft around the star but alas, a new paper has…
Does the Milky Way Have Too Many Satellite Galaxies?
The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are well known satellite galaxies of the Milky Way but there are more. It is surrounded by at least 61 within 1.4 million light years (for context the Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 million light years away) but there are likely to be more. A team of astronomers have been…
Astronomers are on the Hunt for Dyson Spheres
There’s something poetic about humanity’s attempt to detect other civilizations somewhere in the Milky Way’s expanse. There’s also something futile about it. But we’re not going to stop. There’s little doubt about that. One group of scientists thinks that we may already have detected technosignatures from a technological civilization’s Dyson Spheres, but the detection is…
The Milky Way’s Most Massive Stellar Black Hole is Only 2,000...
Astronomers have found the largest stellar mass black hole in the Milky Way so far. At 33 solar masses, it dwarfs the previous record-holder, Cygnus X-1, which has only 21 solar masses. Most stellar mass black holes have about 10 solar masses, making the new one—Gaia BH3—a true giant. Supermassive black holes (SMBH) like Sagittarius…
Second-biggest black hole in the Milky Way found
Enlarge / The star's orbit, shown here in light, is influenced by the far more massive black hole, indicated by the red orbit. As far as black holes go, there are two categories: supermassive ones that live at the center of the galaxies (and we're unsure about how they got there) and stellar mass ones…
