Milky Way

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

Andromeda Galaxy, M31

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

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

Although largely invisible, researchers have located the position of the super massive black hole at the centre of our Galaxy by observing the motion of stars that orbit close to it. Its position is shown here by the blue halo. Credit: ESO/M. Parsa/L. Calçada

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

brown dwarf main

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

DimmingStarMAIN

Mystery of dimming star deepens