The European Space Agency's Milky Way-mapper Gaia has completed the sky-scanning phase of its mission, racking up more than three trillion observations of about two billion stars and other objects over the last decade.
The plot has just thickened in the mystery tale about the unseen mass skulking inside the largest cluster of stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
For the first time, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has detected and "weighed" a galaxy that not only existed around 600 million years after the big bang, but is also similar to what our Milky Way.
The Milky Way is only one system and may not be typical of how other galaxies formed. That's why it's critical to find similar galaxies and compare them
By studying hot gas glowing in circumgalactic space, astrophysicists have found evidence of enormous magnetic fields that wind through and around our galaxy's dark matter 'halo'.
A fluffy cluster of stars spilling across the sky may have a secret hidden in its heart: a swarm of over 100 stellar-mass black holes.
The study suggests Sagittarius A* likely formed through a merger with another black hole, explaining its spin and misalignment.
Look hard enough at the roiling mist of gas and starlight that is our galaxy, and you'll find traces of a violent upbringing.
For years, astronomers thought it was the Milky Way’s destiny to collide with its near neighbor the Andromeda galaxy a few billion years from now. But a new simulation finds a 50% chance the impending crunch will end up a near-miss.
Astronomers have found evidence for an intermediate-mass black hole in IRS 13, a population of dusty stellar objects within the nuclear star cluster of our Milky Way Galaxy.
The two new satellites, named Virgo III and Sextans II, were discovered in a region of space already crowded with more dwarf galaxies than models of dark matter predict.
The Milky Way is only as massive as it is because of collisions and mergers with other galaxies.
A study of the stars crashing around in the Milky Way's galactic center suggests that they are much, much older than they appear – and that their youthful good looks are the result of cosmic cannibalism.
A new image from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration has uncovered strong and organised magnetic fields spiraling from the edge of the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*).
A search for the first stars that winked into existence at the dawn of the Universe has yielded one of the oldest stars we've found yet, right next door to our own galaxy.
