Milky Way

The Milky Way can be seen from Earth with the naked eye, but only under dark skies away from light pollution. This image was captured by John Colismo from Chile's Atacama Desert. Credit: John Colosimo (colosimophotography.com)/ESO

What is the Milky Way?

An artist's impression of the Gaia spacecraft mapping the Milky Way
Copyright ESA/ATG medialab; background: ESO/S. Brunier

ESA’s Gaia: mapping the Milky Way

The Gaia satellite has mapped out the position and velocity of over a billion stars

Our Galaxy’s cannibal past revealed

An image of the Milky Way’s central bulge. Will this new study discover the Sun’s missing siblings that were flung across the Galaxy? Credit: ESO/F. Char

Astronomers search for the Sun’s siblings

An ALMA image showing the centre of the Milky Way and the location of 11 protostars found remarkably close to its supermassive black hole (indicated by the star). The lines show the direction of the bipolar lobes created by high-velocity jets from the protostars. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), Yusef-Zadeh et al.; B. Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF)

Stars form close to Milky Way’s black hole

This artist's impression shows the orbits of three of the stars very close to the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. Analysis of data from ESO’s Very Large Telescope and other telescopes suggests that the orbits of these stars may show the subtle effects predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity. There are hints that the orbit of the star called S2 is deviating slightly from the path calculated using classical physics. The position of the supermassive black hole is marked with a white circle with a blue halo.

Relativity observed near Milky Way’s black hole

An artist’s illustration based on a Hubble Space Telescope image of the Pinwheel Galaxy, M101. It depicts a supermassive black hole at the centre of the galaxy blasting out winds from the centre.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The Milky Way’s far-flung origins

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Milky Way home to 100 billion ‘failed stars’

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Milky Way’s 6 million-year-old black hole burp

This magnificent 360-degree panoramic image, covering the entire southern and northern celestial sphere, reveals the cosmic landscape that surrounds our tiny blue planet. This gorgeous starscape serves as the first of three extremely high-resolution images featured in the GigaGalaxy Zoom project, launched by ESO within the framework of the International Year of Astronomy 2009 (IYA2009). The plane of our Milky Way Galaxy, which we see edge-on from our perspective on Earth, cuts a luminous swath across the image. The projection used in GigaGalaxy Zoom place the viewer in front of our Galaxy with the Galactic Plane running horizontally through the image — almost as if we were looking at the Milky Way from the outside. From this vantage point, the general components of our spiral galaxy come clearly into view, including its disc, marbled with both dark and glowing nebulae, which harbours bright, young stars, as well as the Galaxy’s central bulge and its satellite galaxies. As filming extended over several months, objects from the Solar System came and went through the star fields, with bright planets such as Venus and Jupiter. For copyright reasons, we cannot provide here the full 800-million-pixel original image, which can be requested from Serge Brunier. The high resolution image provided here contains 18 million pixels.

Podcast: The mission to map the Milky Way

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Mystery of dimming star deepens

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Review: Galaxy

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Astronomers spot stellar void in Milky Way

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Pulsing stars reveal ancient galactic core