Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is a beautiful barred spiral galaxy, but we will never see what it looks like from the outside. It ...

The Milky Way contains more than 100 billion stars, each following its own evolutionary path through birth, life, and ...

A research team in Japan has created a groundbreaking Milky Way simulation that follows more than 100 billion stars with a level of detail that was once thought impossible.

When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. This spectrograph map, generated from data collected by NASA's New Horizons probe, depicts the ...

Have you ever wondered how astronomers manage to map out the Milky Way when it's so incredibly vast? One of the most powerful tools is something called 21 cm radiation. Hydrogen, the most abundant ...

Voluminous clouds of cosmic dust permeate our galaxy, but only recently has software allowed detailed observations of the stuff at scale. Reading time 2 minutes Astronomers at the Max Planck Institute ...

Right now, our solar system is hosting a friendly (it is friendly, right?) visitor from far, far away. But it turns out, it's also visiting from long, long ago, and that makes our friend (it is a ...

The intrepid mapping mission has collected more than three trillion observations that'll change the way we see our neck of the cosmic woods. Reading time 3 minutes The European Space Agency’s Gaia ...

If you look up on a clear night from a darksky location, you might see the Milky Way as a faint band of thousands of stars. But these sparkling lights are just a tiny fraction of our cosmic ...