The Milky Way is the galaxy that contains our Solar System. This name derives from its appearance as a dim "milky" glowing band arching across the night sky, in which the naked eye cannot distinguish individual stars. The term "Milky Way" is a translation of the Classical Latin via lactea, from the Hellenistic Greek γαλαξίας κύκλος (pr. galaxías kýklos, "milky circle"). The Milky Way appears like a band because it is a disk-shaped structure being viewed from inside.
All stories in Milky Way
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AI helps produce world's largest 3D map of the universe
Scientists at the University of Hawaii's Mānoa Institute for Astronomy (IfA) used AI to create a catalog of stars, galaxies, ...
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6 galactic galaxies orbiting a black hole could help answer a cosmic mystery
ESOAstronomers at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) recently found six galaxies orbiting a black hole in the ancient Universe. ...
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Something's strange about this 'normal' looking ancient galaxy
An ancient galaxy called SPT0418–47 has been found near the edge of the observable Universe. This family of stars looks ...
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Hubble reveals Andromeda has made contact with our galaxy
A magnificent cloud of diffuse halo of plasma surrounding our galactic neighbor, Andromeda, was recently mapped by ...
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Scientists: What if black holes had a safe zone where little planets could live? Let's call them 'blanets'
Every once in a while the scientific community comes up with a discovery so important that it immediately changes the course ...
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Colonizing our solar system will make our species very hard to eliminate
The human future in the cosmos could be all but limitless, if we don’t destroy ourselves first. The same would be true ...
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Meet the astrophysicist who found Nyx, a new family of stars beyond the Milky Way
The Milky Way contains hundreds of millions of stars, but not all of them are native to our galaxy. Astronomers have ...
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AI finds 250 foreign stars that migrated to our galaxy
Astronomers have used deep learning to discover 250 new stars in the Milky Way, which they believe were born outside the ...
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Super-puff worlds: These Jupiter-sized planets are light as cotton candy
Astronomers once believed that most solar systems would be much like our own, with small rocky planets near their sun, accompanied ...
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These planets might host alien life, but we’d never know because they’re too dusty to see anything
Dusty worlds like the desert planet Arrakis from Dune may be common throughout the galaxy. Some of these worlds, ...
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New study suggests this extremely dense star cluster is stunting planet formation
Using the Hubble Space Telescope researchers have conducted a pioneering 3-year study of the massive dense young star cluster ...
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Scientists built an AI to discover new stars in the quest to explain our galaxy's origin
Researchers have used AI system to spot thousands of new stars that could hold clues about the formation of the galaxy
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The center of the Milky Way twinkles in radiation — this could explain how supermassive black holes behave
The center of the Milky Way twinkles in microwave radiation, seen in new data obtained by astronomers using the Atacama Large ...
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Satellite galaxies could help physicists test a new dark matter theory
Dark matter is thought to make up roughly 85 percent of all matter in the observable Universe, but little is known about ...
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Hubble telescope discovers Galaxy-ripping quasar tsunamis in space
Quasar tsunamis discovered by astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope erupt in the most energetic outflows of material ...
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New research sheds light on the big bang that was bigger than the Big Bang
The largest explosion ever seen in the history of the Universe ripped through a plasma cloud hundreds of millions of years ...
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Scientists have discovered strange objects orbiting our galaxy’s black hole
Every major galaxy is home to a supermassive black hole, and our own Milky Way is no exception. Astronomers recently ...
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An ancient, dying galaxy could help astronomers learn more about the Milky Way
The most distant dying galaxy known to astronomers contains nearly one trillion stars, making this family of stars ...
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Something is killing galaxies, and scientists don’t understand why
In the most extreme regions of the universe, galaxies are being killed. Their star formation is being shut down and astronomers ...
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This exoplanet challenges our understanding of planet formation
The discovery of yet another exoplanet is no longer news. More than 4,000 planets around other stars have now been found ...
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Spoiler alert: Here's how The Milky Way dies
Our neighboring galaxy, Andromeda, is a cold-blooded killer and a cannibal to boot. In about 4 billion years it's going to ...
