Milky Way

A view of the centre of the Milky Way by the Very Large Telescope. Credit ESO/Nogueras-Lara et al.

Study puts the Milky Way’s disc at 10 billion years old

A view of the centre of the Milky Way by the Very Large Telescope. Credit ESO/Nogueras-Lara et al.

Eye On The Sky Very Large Telescope views the centre of the Milky Way

A cataclysmic flare, propelled from the heart of the Milky Way 3.5 million years ago, was felt 200,000 lightyears away. Credit: James Josephides/Thorsten Tepper-Garcia/ASTRO 3D

Observations shed light on the history of our Galaxy’s supermassive black hole

Milky Way bubbles captured by the MeerKAT telescope. Credit: Oxford, SARAO

Astrophotography

MeerKAT spots Milky Way bubbles

A Spitzer Space Telescope of a region within the Milky Way. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Milky Way Project

Astrophotography

Eye On The Sky Spitzer Space Telescope views cosmic bubbles in infrared

An image of the Andromeda Galaxy by NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer.

Andromeda Galaxy’s last meal

S5-HVS1 has been speeding away ever since its dust-up with black hole Sgr A* 4.8 million years ago. Credit: hadzi3/iStock/Getty Images, Vadim Sadovski/iStock/Getty Images.

Speeding star reveals the secrets of the Milky Way

A section of Mary's Milky Way mosaic. Credit: Mary McIntyre

Astrophoto guides

Astrophotography guide Create a Milky Way mosaic

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

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Astronomy star catalogues: which to use and when

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.

Milky Way rich in ‘greasy’ molecules

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

Our Galaxy’s cannibal past revealed

An artist’s impression of a collision between our Galaxy and a smaller dwarf galaxy 10 billion years ago: an event that may be responsible for the Milky Way’s central bulge. Image Credit: V. Belokurov (Cambridge, UK); based on image by ESO/Juan Carlos Muñoz.

Early Milky Way collided with small galaxy

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