Milky Way Mass

On August 15, 2024, NASA’s Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project, featuring the contributions of dedicated citizen scientists, made a groundbreaking discovery: an object moving at an astonishing speed of 1 million miles per hour, which will soon escape the gravitational pull of the Milky Way. This hypervelocity object, catalogued as CWISE J124909.08+...

Observations by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope are upending the understanding of the early universe, indicating the presence of large and mature but remarkably compact galaxies teeming with stars far sooner than scientists had considered possible. Astronomers said data obtained by the telescope reveals what appear to be six big galaxies as matur...

Astronomers have detected in the stellar halo that represents the Milky Way's outer limits a group of stars more distant from Earth than any known within our own galaxy — almost halfway to a neighboring galaxy. The researchers said these 208 stars inhabit the most remote reaches of the Milky Way's halo, a spherical stellar cloud dominated by the...

The aftermath of a large star's explosive death is seen in an image released on Monday by the European Southern Observatory, showing immense filaments of brightly shining gas that was blasted into space during the supernova. Before exploding at the end of its life cycle, the star is believed to have had a mass at least eight times greater than our ...

Astronomers have identified a black hole that not only is classified as dormant but appears to have been born without the explosion of a dying star, in a galaxy adjacent to the Milky Way. Black holes are extraordinarily dense objects with gravity so intense not even light can escape. Deemed a cosmic "needle in a haystack", the newly discovered ‘d...

A team of astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley, has discovered what appears to be a free-floating black hole for the first time using gravitational microlensing. The unseen compact object's mass is estimated to be between 1.6 and 4.4 times that of the Sun, according to the astronomers.

A team of researchers have found that a quadruple star system – known as HD 74438 – could represent a new channel by which thermonuclear supernova explosions can occur in the universe. In their study published in the journal Nature Astronomy, they have shown that the gravitational effects of the outer binary system are changing the orbits of th...

Sagittarius A* possesses four million times the mass of our Sun and is located about 26,000 light-years from Earth.

Residing at the center of our spiral-shaped Milky Way galaxy is a beast - a supermassive black hole possessing 4 million times the mass of our sun and consuming any material including gas, dust and stars straying within its immense gravitational pull

Using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, researchers have identified a black hole having 200,000 times the mass of the Sun in Mrk 462, a dwarf galaxy with only several hundred million stars. In comparison, our Milky Way has a few hundred billion stars.

A team of astronomers has discovered a huge cloud of hot, faintly glowing gas in space that is bigger than the Milky Way galaxy. They said that the cosmic gas cloud, the first of its kind, may have stripped from a galaxy. What they found most surprising was that the cloud has remained clumped together for hundreds of millions of years without dissi...

Dark matter, mysterious invisible stuff that makes up most of the mass of galaxies including our own Milky Way, is confounding scientists again, with new observations of distant galaxies conflicting with the current understanding of its nature.

This large young planet is forming around a star called AB Aurigae that is about 2.4 times the mass of the sun and located in our Milky Way galaxy 520 light years from Earth, researchers said on Wednesday. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).

Astronomers have discovered a black hole in the Milky Way so huge that it challenges existing models of how stars evolve, researchers said Thursday.

The Milky Way gobbled up a galaxy one quarter of its mass 10 billion years ago in a "violent collision" that didn't fully settle for eons, astronomers said in new research published Monday.

On August 15, 2024, NASA’s Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project, featuring the contributions of dedicated citizen scientists, made a groundbreaking discovery: an object moving at an astonishing speed of 1 million miles per hour, which will soon escape the gravitational pull of the Milky Way. This hypervelocity object, catalogued as CWISE J124909.08+...

Observations by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope are upending the understanding of the early universe, indicating the presence of large and mature but remarkably compact galaxies teeming with stars far sooner than scientists had considered possible. Astronomers said data obtained by the telescope reveals what appear to be six big galaxies as matur...

Astronomers have detected in the stellar halo that represents the Milky Way's outer limits a group of stars more distant from Earth than any known within our own galaxy — almost halfway to a neighboring galaxy. The researchers said these 208 stars inhabit the most remote reaches of the Milky Way's halo, a spherical stellar cloud dominated by the...

The aftermath of a large star's explosive death is seen in an image released on Monday by the European Southern Observatory, showing immense filaments of brightly shining gas that was blasted into space during the supernova. Before exploding at the end of its life cycle, the star is believed to have had a mass at least eight times greater than our ...

Astronomers have identified a black hole that not only is classified as dormant but appears to have been born without the explosion of a dying star, in a galaxy adjacent to the Milky Way. Black holes are extraordinarily dense objects with gravity so intense not even light can escape. Deemed a cosmic "needle in a haystack", the newly discovered ‘d...

A team of astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley, has discovered what appears to be a free-floating black hole for the first time using gravitational microlensing. The unseen compact object's mass is estimated to be between 1.6 and 4.4 times that of the Sun, according to the astronomers.

A team of researchers have found that a quadruple star system – known as HD 74438 – could represent a new channel by which thermonuclear supernova explosions can occur in the universe. In their study published in the journal Nature Astronomy, they have shown that the gravitational effects of the outer binary system are changing the orbits of th...

Sagittarius A* possesses four million times the mass of our Sun and is located about 26,000 light-years from Earth.

Residing at the center of our spiral-shaped Milky Way galaxy is a beast - a supermassive black hole possessing 4 million times the mass of our sun and consuming any material including gas, dust and stars straying within its immense gravitational pull

Using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, researchers have identified a black hole having 200,000 times the mass of the Sun in Mrk 462, a dwarf galaxy with only several hundred million stars. In comparison, our Milky Way has a few hundred billion stars.

A team of astronomers has discovered a huge cloud of hot, faintly glowing gas in space that is bigger than the Milky Way galaxy. They said that the cosmic gas cloud, the first of its kind, may have stripped from a galaxy. What they found most surprising was that the cloud has remained clumped together for hundreds of millions of years without dissi...

Dark matter, mysterious invisible stuff that makes up most of the mass of galaxies including our own Milky Way, is confounding scientists again, with new observations of distant galaxies conflicting with the current understanding of its nature.

This large young planet is forming around a star called AB Aurigae that is about 2.4 times the mass of the sun and located in our Milky Way galaxy 520 light years from Earth, researchers said on Wednesday. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).

Astronomers have discovered a black hole in the Milky Way so huge that it challenges existing models of how stars evolve, researchers said Thursday.

The Milky Way gobbled up a galaxy one quarter of its mass 10 billion years ago in a "violent collision" that didn't fully settle for eons, astronomers said in new research published Monday.