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It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes they instead leave you speechless. This is the case with this spellbinding image captured by a B.C. photographer of a rare comet, the Northern Lights, Milky Way, and bioluminescence. Check out the incredible rare beauty captured in this photo. Spellbinding Image Captures Four Rare Sights in One Snapping a gorgeous image of just one of these incredible occurrences is impressive. A photo that contains all four? Absolutely incredible. British Columbia-based landscape and night sky photographer David McColm went out in late July to attempt to capture one...

An international team of researchers have discovered a dense, cold gas that's been shot out from the center of the Milky Way "like bullets". Exactly how the gas has been ejected is still a mystery, but the research team, including Professor Naomi McClure-Griffiths from The Australian National University (ANU), say their findings could have important implications for the future of our galaxy. The study also raises new questions about what's happening in our galactic center right now. The center of the Milky Way is home to a massive black hole, but it's unclear whether this black hole has expelled the...

Stars are formed within large clouds of gas and dust known as stellar nurseries. While star formation was once seen as a simple gravitational process, we now know it is a complex dance of interactions. When one star forms it can send shock waves through the interstellar medium that trigger other stars to form. Supernovae and galactic collisions can trigger the creation of stars as well. In the late 1800s, astronomer Benjamin Gould studied OB stars and found that many of them lie within a partial ring within our galaxy, titled about 20 degrees from the plane of the Milky...

The supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*, is relatively quiet. It's not an active nucleus, spewing light and heat into the space around it; most of the time, the black hole's activity is low key, with minimal fluctuations in its brightness. When we view that radiation with a telescope using the infrared range, it translates as brightness. Normally, the brightness of Sgr A* flickers a bit like a candle, varying from minutes to hours. But when the surroundings of a black hole flare that brightly, it's a sign something may have gotten close enough...

The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy with curved arms stretching out into space. Most depictions of our galaxy show it as being rather flat, but data from the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment at the university suggests the opposite. The team, who describe our galaxy as being less a flat disc and more a “wobbly, uncooked pizza crust,” mapped the position of a specific type of star called Cepheids. Cepheids are pulsating stars and it’s easy for researchers to measure the distance between them and Earth. Using data from 2,431 Cepheids, the team was able to create its incredibly detailed...

Our Milky Way galaxy is part of a group of galaxies called the Local Group. The Local Group is dominated by the Milky Way and its larger sibling, the Andromeda Galaxy. The many dwarf galaxies clinging gravitationally to the Milky Way and Andromeda round out the Local Group's population. The Local Group itself is part of an even larger structure, called the Laniakea Super-Cluster, which contains over 100,000 galaxies. Local Group and nearest galaxies. (Wikipedia Commons/Antonio Ciccolella) The new study is titled "Cosmicflows-3: Cosmography of the Local Void." Cosmicflows-3 is a compendium of over 17,000 galaxy distances in our cosmic...

There's a "dark impactor" blasting holes in our galaxy. Stellar streams are lines of stars moving together across galaxies, often originating in smaller blobs of stars that collided with the galaxy in question. Under normal conditions, the stream should be more or less a single line, stretched out by our galaxy's gravity, she said in her presentation. Astronomers would expect a single gap in the stream, at the point where the original globular cluster was before its stars drifted away in two directions. But Bonaca showed that GD-1 has a second gap. And that gap has a ragged edge —...

Scientists have finally been able to accurately calculate the weight of the Milky Way, overcoming the difficult hurdle of measuring dark matter, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced Thursday. After years of struggling to estimate the size of our galaxy, astronomers with NASA and the ESA used data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the ESA’s Gaia mission to determine the Milky Way weighs about 1.5 trillion solar masses within a radius of 129,000 light years from the center. Because dark matter makes up about 90 percent of the galaxy, estimates of the Milky Way’s weight have differed widely in...

The deserts of Argentina take on a starring role in this photographer’s breathtaking Milky Way shots. Amateur snapper Gonzalo Javier Santile, 46, spent the last two years capturing these rare shots of the galaxy as it arced over deserts in Salta Cafayate, Cordoba Valle de Punilla, Provincia de Buenos Aires and the Rio Negro province. In his pictures, the Milky Way can be admired as it towers over canyons, cacti, bushes, and even small brooks and lakes.

Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, makes for a pretty space picture, and it looks normal at a distance. But a new 3D map reveals a surprise: The Milky Way is being warped and twisted by its stars. The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, in which stars and gas clouds exist mainly in its two spiral "arms." Our massive neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, is also a spiral. Spiral galaxies usually appear very flat and easy to see through a telescope, said the researchers behind the new map, published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy. Using 1,339 large, pulsating stars...

Broderick's work builds on earlier research by two teams that studied the galactic center of the Milky Way in near-infrared. This included the work of Reinhard Genzel, an astronomer from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, as well as researchers Andrea Ghez and Mark Morris of University of California, Los Angeles. At the time, their work revealed that the center of the Milky Way wasn't steady, but instead would drastically brighten about once a day for about 30 or 40 minutes, Broderick said. Researchers think supermassive black holes exist at the center of most, if not...

A bizarre rogue planet without a star is roaming the Milky Way just 20 light-years from the Sun. And according to a recently published study in The Astrophysical Journal, this strange, nomadic world has an incredibly powerful magnetic field that is some 4 million times stronger than Earth’s. Furthermore, it generates spectacular auroras that would put our own northern lights to shame. The new observations, made with the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), not only are the first radio observations of a planetary-mass object beyond our solar system, but also mark the first time...

It turns out that our galaxy looks the way it does today thanks to a run-in with something called the 'Gaia Sausage'. As greasy as space is, we're not talking cosmic processed foods here. Rather, astronomers have found signs that a small galaxy smashed into the Milky Way billions of years ago, leaving behind a mess of stars with some rather unusual orbits. So, what makes this cosmic object a 'sausage'? Cambridge University astronomer Wyn Evans says it all came down to the paths of the stars following the impact... Collisions between galaxies aren't all that unusual, and the Milky...

Aa Astronomers are celebrating a massive data release that offers them the richest ever map of the Milky Way. The information comes from ESA's GAIA space telescope, which has surveyed almost two billion stars in our galaxy. They now have very precise data on billions of stars around our galaxy that will make for decades of analysis. It gives them the possibility to research the history of our galaxy and postulate what might happen in the future, too.Astronomer François Mignard was one of the founding fathers of the GAIA mission. So why does this data release make such a difference...

Anticipated but never before seen, the existence of tens of thousands of these dark objects at the galactic center could have far-reaching implications for astrophysics An artist's rendering of the Milky Way's core, with a supermassive black hole at its center. Scientists have discovered what appear to be twelve smaller black holes orbiting our galaxy's central giant. Each is thought to actually be a binary system composed of a black hole and a low-mass star. Gas siphoned from the star glows in x-rays as it falls into the black holes, allowing them to be seen. Credit: Columbia University For the...

Budding astronauts can take a virtual space flight to the deepest depths of our galaxy, thanks to a stunning new interactive graphic produced by Nasa. The immersive 360° visualisation depicts the heart of the Milky Way, roughly 26,000 light years (150,000 trillion miles) away from Earth. It was created using data taken by satellites, which capture light that has managed to escape the monster black hole that lies in the middle of our spiral galaxy. Watch video hereThe project, made using data from Nasa’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, lets viewers control their own exploration of the fascinating environment of volatile giant...

The map covers the entire sky and shows curious clouds of neutral hydrogen gas that are moving at a different speed to the normal rotation of the Milky Way. ... The map was compiled by capturing an image of the sky and masking out gas that is moving at the same pace as the Milky Way in order to show the location of gas travelling at a different speed. As a result, the most sensitive and highest-resolution all-sky map of high-velocity clouds ever was created. ... The research used data from a survey known as HI4PI, a study of the...

The Milky Way, just like every galaxy in the cosmos, moves. While everything in the universe is constantly moving because the universe itself is expanding, since the 1970s astronomers have known of an additional motion, called peculiar velocity. This is a different sort of flow that we seem to be caught in. The Local Group of galaxies — a collection that includes the Milky Way, Andromeda and a few dozen smaller galactic companions — moves at about 600 kilometers per second with respect to the leftover radiation from the Big Bang. Over the past few decades, astronomers have tallied up...

An immense black hole 100,000 times bigger than the sun has been discovered at the heart of the Milky Way. The enormous void, which lies around 25,000 light years from Earth, could help scientists uncover the how stars, galaxies and even life itself came to be in the universe. ..." According to reports, this newly-discovered black hole could rank as the second largest ever seen in the Milky Way. Despite its immense size, scientists have called it a "mini me" version of its super-massive "cousin" known as Sagittitarius A*.

Astronomers find evidence of enormous black hole one hundred thousand times more massive than the sun in a gas cloud near the galaxy’s centre If confirmed, the black hole will rank as the second largest black hole ever seen in the Milky Way after the supermassive black hole known as Sagittarius A*. An enormous black hole one hundred thousand times more massive than the sun has been found hiding in a toxic gas cloud wafting around near the heart of the Milky Way. If the discovery is confirmed, the invisible behemoth will rank as the second largest black hole ever...