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Explanation: On March 27, five sounding rockets leapt into early morning skies from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Part of the Anomalous Transport Rocket EXperiment (ATREX), begining at 4:58 am EDT the rockets launched consecutively at 80 second intervals. Releasing a chemical tracer they created luminous white clouds within Earth's ionosphere at altitudes above 60 to 65 miles, swept along by the poorly understood high-altitude jet stream. (Not the same jet stream that airliners fly through at altitudes of 5 to 6 miles.) Seen along the mid-atlantic region of the United States, the clouds drifted through starry skies, captured...

Explanation: From Sagittarius to Scorpius, the central Milky Way is a truly beautiful part of planet Earth's night sky. The gorgeous region is captured in this wide field image spanning about 30 degrees. The impressive cosmic vista, taken in 2010, shows off intricate dust lanes, bright nebulae, and star clusters scattered through our galaxy's rich central starfields. Starting on the left, look for the Lagoon and Trifid nebulae, the Cat's Paw, while on the right lies the Pipe dark nebula, and the colorful clouds of Rho Ophiuchi and Antares (right). The actual center of our Galaxy lies about 26,000 light...

Too beautiful not to post. What you're looking at is a close-up shot up of the central bulge of a giant spiral galaxy viewed edge on. Can you see it? The bulge, that is? It's that glowing lens-shaped mass that's trying unsuccessfully to hide behind those dark foreground clouds. Yes, of course, it's the central bulge of our own Milky Way Galaxy! :-) We're looking at the "lens" edge-on from our vantage point here in the Orion Spur (a minor spiral arm) of the Milky Way, 30,000 light years from the galaxy's center. Some "close-up," huh? We see the central...

For almost 20 years astrophysicists have been trying to recreate the formation of spiral galaxies such as our Milky Way realistically. Now astrophysicists from the University of Zurich present the world's first realistic simulation of the formation of our home galaxy together with astronomers from the University of California at Santa Cruz. The new results were partly calculated on the computer of the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS) and show, for instance, that there has to be stars on the outer edge of the Milky Way. See also the interview with Lucio Mayer from the University of Zurich explaining the...

One of the challenges in making this video, was trying to get good storm and star shots. The opportunity doesn’t come along very often, the storm has to be moving the right speed and the lightning can overexpose the long exposures. I had several opportunities this summer to get storm and star shots. In one instance, within a minute of picking up the camera and dolly, 70mph winds hit. One storm was perfect, it came straight towards the setup, then died right before it reached it. At the 1:57 mark a Whitetail buck came in to check out the setup....

Explanation: What's that below the Milky Way? Historic kilns. Built in the 1870s in rural Nevada, USA to process local wood into charcoal, the kilns were soon abandon due to a town fire and flooding, but remain in good condition even today. The above panorama is a digital conglomerate of five separate images taken in early June from the same location. Visible above the unusual kilns is a colorful star field, highlighted by the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy appearing along a diagonal toward the lower right. Many famous sites in our Galaxy are visible, including the Pipe...

This is a stunning 360 degree panorama of the night sky that was stitched together from 37,000 images by Nick Risinger, a native of Seattle.  Nick trekked more than 60,000 miles around the western United States and South Africa to create the largest-ever true-color image of the stellar sphere. The final result is an interactive zoomable sky map showing the Milky Way as it has never been seen before. Including stars, planets, galaxies and the nebulae around it. "The genesis of this was to educate and enlighten people about the natural beauty that is hidden, but surrounds us," Risinger...

- NASA Announces Televised Chandra News Conference - NASA will hold a news conference at 12:30 p.m. EST on Monday, Nov. 15, to discuss the Chandra X-ray Observatory's discovery of an exceptional object in our cosmic neighborhood.

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Two huge, unexplained gamma ray emitting bubbles have been discovered at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, US astronomers said Tuesday. Masked by a fog of gamma rays that appears throughout the sky, the bubbles form a feature spanning 50,000 light-years and could be the remnant of a supersized black hole eruption or the outflows from a burst of star formation, the astronomers said. The structure spans more than half of the visible sky, from the constellation Virgo to the constellation Grus, and it may be millions of years old, the astronomers said in a paper...

HAMILTON, CANADA – Women who drink two large glasses of milk a day after their weight-lifting routine gained more muscle and lost more fat compared to women who drank sugar-based energy drinks, a McMaster study has found. The study appears in the June issue of Medicine and Science in Sport and Exercise. "Resistance training is not a typical choice of exercise for women," says Stu Phillips, professor in the Department of Kinesiology at McMaster University. "But the health benefits of resistance training are enormous: It boosts strength, bone, muscular and metabolic health in a way that other types of exercise...

"It's just so amazing to see the band of the Milky Way arcing from one end of the horizon straight above you to the other," he said in an interview with ABC News. "And if you're in a really dark place, the light of the Milky Way can actually cast a shadow."

Cobbling together 3000 individual photographs, a physicist has made a new high-resolution panoramic image of the full night sky, with the Milky Way galaxy as its centerpiece. Axel Mellinger, a professor at Central Michigan University, describes the process of making the panorama in the November issue of Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

A giant cloud of hydrogen gas is speeding toward a collision with our Milky Way Galaxy, and when it hits -- in less than 40 million years -- it may set off a spectacular burst of stellar fireworks.

Stephen Hawking believes that one of the major factors in the possible scarcity of intelligent life in our galaxy is the high probability of an asteroid or comet colliding with inhabited planets. We have observed, Hawking points out in Life in the Universe, the collision of a comet, Schumacher-Levi, with Jupiter (below), which produced a series of enormous fireballs, plumes many thousands of kilometers high, hot "bubbles" of gas in the atmosphere, and large dark "scars" on the atmosphere which had lifetimes on the order of weeks. It is thought the collision of a rather smaller body with the Earth,...

New photographs of the center of the Milky Way reveal the chaotic environment at the heart of our galaxy, where a supermassive black hole is thought to lurk. The close-up views come from two recent projects - one undertaken by an amateur astronomer. Stephane Guisard, an engineer at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile, used his personal 10-cm telescope to take 1,200 individual images over 29 nights during his free time. He then combined the photos, which took a total of more than 200 hours of exposure time, into a stunning mosaic image of the Milky Way's center. The...

Though the Milky Way is taking a good beating from nearby mini-galaxies that sometimes slam into it, our galaxy is not likely to de destroyed by this process as some scientists had predicted, a new study finds. Circling around the Milky Way are between 20 and 25 known satellite dwarf galaxies, which are smaller clumps of stars bound in orbit around the Milky Way by gravitational attraction. Some pessimists predicted the Milky Way was doomed to a grizzly death by dismemberment if enough of these galaxies collide with it. In fact, scientists think many satellite galaxies have already rammed into...

A LARGE satellite galaxy may be lurking, hidden from view, next door to our own. Sukanya Chakrabarti and Leo Blitz of the University of California, Berkeley, suspected that the gravity of a nearby galaxy was causing perturbations that have been observed in gas on the fringes of the Milky Way. "We did a large range of simulations where we varied the mass of the perturber and the distance of closest approach," says Chakrabarti. In the best-fitting simulation, the unseen galaxy has about 1 per cent of the Milky Way's mass, or 10 billion times the mass of the sun. That's...

Astronomers love their sky maps, and this latest is a doozie. It reveals thousands of previously undiscovered knots of cold cosmic dust, each a potential star waiting to be born. The new atlas of dust covers the inner regions of our Milky Way Galaxy, where stars, gas and dust are all packed tightly together, where chaos reigns, where massive stars are born. It's so dusty in there that optical telescopes can't see anything. But cosmic material emits and reflects various forms of radiation besides the visible. The new observations were made in submillimeter-wavelength light, which is between infrared light and...

PASADENA, CALIF. — Baby stars have at last been found in the harsh environment at the center of the Milky Way, astronomers said here this week at the 214th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. These are "stars that have just ignited their core and they are just starting to produce light. So it is a very early phase in the star formation process," said team member Solange Ramirez of NASA's Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech. The heart of our galaxy is an extreme environment, with fierce stellar winds, shock waves and a core supermassive black hole all packed into...

The Milky Way, sometimes called simply the Galaxy, is the galaxy in which our Solar System is located. It is a barred spiral galaxy that is part of the Local Group of galaxies. It is one of billions of galaxies in the observable universe. Its name is a translation of the Latin Via Lactea, which derives from the Greek Γαλαξίας (Galaxias or Galaxiases), both of which refer to the pale band of light formed by the galactic plane as seen from Earth (see etymology of galaxy). Some sources hold that, strictly speaking, the term Milky Way should refer exclusively to...