If you look upward on a clear night from Earth's darkest regions, you'll probably glimpse a broad stripe of stars, cloaked in clouds of dust and gas, arcing across the sky. What you're seeing is a portion of the Milky Way, our home galaxy, which measures , light-years in diameter. Its core hosts a supermassive black hole — a giant gravitational field so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape — and its multiple "arms" that spiral from the center hold hundreds of billions of stars , one of which is our own sun. The Milky Way is estimated to be Other galaxies may be older and bigger, but as Earth's cosmic address, the Milky Way has long fascinated humans.

Milky Way (chocolate bar)



Hubble Reveals First Pictures of Milky Way's Formative Years | NASA
Researchers from the Macquarie University in Australia and the Chinese Academy of Sciences have found for the first time that our solar system is anything but stable and flat. Check your compass, magnetic pole is on the move, say scientists. Researchers allowed the team to develop the first accurate 3D picture of our Milky Way out to its far outer regions. Classical Cepheids are young stars that are some four to 20 times as massive as our Sun and up to , times as bright. Such high stellar masses imply that they live fast and die young, burning through their nuclear fuel very quickly, sometimes in only a few million years.


Fast radio burst detected in the Milky Way is repeating, scientists confirm
The Milky Way Galaxy is most significant to humans because it is home sweet home. But when it comes down to it, our galaxy is a typical barred spiral, much like billions of other galaxies in the universe. Let's take a look at the Milky Way. A glance up at the night sky reveals a broad swath of light.



Fast radio bursts FRBs are some of the most energetic — and most brief — blasts of light in the universe. These mysterious radio wave pulses flash through space a thousand times a day, occasionally brushing past Earth and its vigilant telescopes. FRBs appear and disappear in milliseconds, yet pack more energy than the sun unleashes in three days. Some FRBs repeat over days or months.