milky way | Universe Today

All we can say is, "Wow!" In celebration of the International Year of Astronomy 2009, NASA's Great Observatories — the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory — have collaborated to produce an unprecedented image of the central region of our Milky Way galaxy. This is a never-before-seen view of the turbulent heart of our home galaxy. The image is being unveiled by NASA to commemorate the anniversary of when Galileo first turned his telescope to the heavens in 1609. NASA provided this image and the individual images taken by each of the Great Observatories to more than 150 planetariums, museums, nature centers, libraries, and schools across the country.
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What a gorgeous and immense image! And it's full of stars! An astronomer from Central Michigan University has put together a new high-resolution panoramic image of the full night sky , with the Milky Way galaxy as its centerpiece. Axel Mellinger stitched together over 3,000 images to create this beautiful image, which also comes in an interactive version, showing stars 1,000 times fainter than the human eye can see, as well as hundreds of galaxies, star clusters and nebulae.
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Science observations have begun in earnest for the Herschel Space Telescope, and this spectacular image is the first produced by combining data from two cameras aboard Herschel, the Spectral and Photometric Imaging REceiver (SPIRE), and the Photoconductor Array Camera and Spectrometer (PACS). It shows a tumultuous region in the Southern Cross, visible only because the instruments are tuned to "see" in five different infrared wavelengths. Stunning vistas of cold gas clouds lying near the plane of the Milky Way reveal intense, unexpected activity. The dark, cool region is dotted with stellar factories, like pearls on a cosmic string.
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Chandra has done it again in creating some of the most visually stunning images of our Universe. This time, Chandra's X-ray eyes show a dramatic new vista of the center of the Milky Way galaxy. This mosaic from 88 different images exposes new levels of the complexity and intrigue in the Galactic center, providing a look at stellar evolution, from bright young stars to black holes, in a crowded, hostile environment dominated by a central, supermassive black hole.
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A remarkable new view of the Milky Way toward the constellation Carina is alive with a flurry of stars — and the pièce de résistance is a binary star that's all dressed up in a nebula of its own making.

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) released the new images this week.

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Earth's climate has changed over time, but the cause for the changes has been hotly debated. One idea (Shaviv and Veizer,2003), suggested that perhaps two-thirds to three-fourths of the variance in Earth's temperature over the past 500 million years may be attributable to when our solar system passes through the spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy. The evidence seemed to fit: there appears to be a 140 million year cycle of global climate change, and that correlates when our solar system seems to move between spiral arms, too. Or at least it used to. Since 2003 we have revised our map of the galaxy, which changes the estimation of when Earth transits through the spiral arms.

"Although previous work found a correlation between the 140 Myr climate cycle on Earth and the intersection with spiral arms," write researchers Adrian Melott, Andrew Overholt, and Martin Pohl, "with new data on the structure of the galaxy, this correlation disappears."
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Astronomers have found the first evidence of newborn stars at the center of the Milky Way, a region once thought to be inhospitable to the formation of new stars.

Solange Ramirez, the principal investigator of the research program at NASA’s Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech, announced three objects during a press conference today as part of the 214th meeting of the American Astronomical Society meeting in Pasadena.

"These baby stars … are stars that have just ignited their core, and are just starting to produce light," she said. "It is a very early phase."

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The map above details the Galactic ridge X-ray emission, first detected 25 years ago and observed recently by NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) observatory. The inset shows the zoomed Chandra image of the region, close to the center of the galaxy. 

The mysterious — and formerly blurry — X-ray source puzzled astronomers for a quarter century, but a new paper release today by the journal Nature has helped to clear the air.

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Carbon and oxygen have been spotted in the dust around stars in the center of the Milky Way galaxy, suggesting that the stars have undergone recent disruptions of some kind — and hinting how stars can send heavy elements — like oxygen, carbon, and iron — out across the universe, paving the way for life.

Scientists have long expected to find carbon-rich stars in our galaxy because we know that significant quantities of carbon must be created in many such stars. But carbon had not previously shown up in the clouds of gas around these stars, said Matthew Bobrowsky, an astrophysicist at the University of Maryland and a co-author of a new study reporting the discovery.

“Based on our findings, this is because medium-sized stars rich in carbon sometimes keep that carbon hidden until very near the end of their stellar lives, releasing it only with their final ‘exhalations’,” explained Bobrowsky.

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For many of us, looking closely in the mirror and stepping on the bathroom scale just after the holidays can reveal a substantial surprise. Likewise, astronomers looking closely at the Milky Way have found our galaxy is more massive than previously thought. High-precision measurements of the Milky Way disclose our galaxy is rotating about 100,000 miles per hour faster than previously understood. That increase in speed, said Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, increases the Milky Way’s mass by 50 percent. The larger mass, in turn, means a greater gravitational pull that increases the likelihood of collisions with the Andromeda galaxy or smaller nearby galaxies. So even though we're faster, we're also heavier and more likely to be annihilated. Bummer!
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