In the 20th century, astronomers discovered that our silver river is just one piece of a vast island of stars, and they penned their own galactic origin story. In the simplest telling, it held that ...

Astronomers have long noticed that stars around the Sun fall into two well-defined chemical groups, divided by their levels of magnesium and iron. The separation is striking enough to appear as two ...

The Milky Way is home to gas, dust, billions of stars, and a supermassive black hole at its center. Living in this galactic home gives us exclusive insight into its components, but it also hinders our ...

Researchers led by a Rutgers University-New Brunswick astrophysicist, who looked deeply into space at a period known as "Cosmic Noon," about 2 billion to 3 billion years after the Big Bang, have found ...

Over the past eight years, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia space observatory has transformed our understanding of the history of our Milky Way Galaxy. From Gaia’s perch at Earth’s L2 Lagrange ...

Chinese astronomers have discovered that the Milky Way is not a simple, smoothly warped disk, but contains widespread "wrinkle-like" structures resembling ripples on a water surface, providing new ...

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey V (SDSS-V) has announced its 20th public data release (DR20), delivering a dramatic expansion of ...

The heart of the Milky Way is one of the most crowded and violent places in the galaxy, and it keeps producing structures that no one fully understands. The latest puzzle is a set of slender filaments ...