Tag: milky way

Racial inequities laid bare through social protests.Yet science often rose to tackle these challenges.Hope is also emerging from a gut-wrenching reckoning with racial inequities, sparked by police kil

To say that 2020 was challenging is an understatement.Yet science often rose to tackle these challenges.Hope is also emerging from a gut-wrenching reckoning with racial inequities, sparked by police k

Science News drew over 22 million visitors to our website this year.Here’s a recap of the other most-read news stories and long reads of 2020.Scientists analyzed billions of cells from two people w

Hints of additional mergers have been spotted in bundles of stars known as globular clusters.In August, Kruijssen’s group published a merger lineage of the Milky Way and the dwarf galaxies that form

At the center of the Milky Way lies the biggest object we can be sure exists: a supermassive black hole (SMBH) four million times more massive than the sun.They say, under the right conditions, black

In 1987, a giant star exploded right next to our own Milky Way galaxy.Neutrinos are famously aloof particles, and questions remained over exactly how neutrinos transfer their energy to the star’s or

The Milky Way glows with a gamma ray haze, with energies vastly exceeding anything physicists can produce on Earth, according to a new paper.Gamma rays detected in the study, to be published in Physi

Each year, astronomers discover nova explosions in the Milky Way that cause dim stars to flare up and emit far more light than the sun before they fade again.Now, by detecting the explosions’ infra

New observations of the black hole–star pair called Cygnus X-1 indicate that the black hole weighs about 21 times as much as the sun — nearly 1.The updated mass has astronomers rethinking how som

The supermassive black holes at the centers of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies are doomed to engulf each other in an ill-fated cosmological dance.Astronomers have long known that Andromeda is on