It’s large, it’s fast, and it’s heading toward the Milky Way. Less than 40 million years from now, a giant cloud of hydrogen gas, clocked at 250 kilometers per second, will smash into our home galaxy, likely setting off a huge burst of star formation.
Global warming, the Iraq war, economic woes, fears of terrorism and now, just when it appeared things couldn’t get any worse, astronomers predict the Sun and Earth along with it will be hurled into deep space when our galaxy collides with a neighboring galaxy.
Our galaxy’s supermassive black hole is responsible for the mysterious gamma-ray emission from the galactic center, a new study suggests. Churning magnetic fields around the monster black hole may act like a giant particle accelerator, leading to high-speed collisions that produce the gamma rays.
A recent sky survey has turned up eight new members in our Local Group of galaxies, including a new class of ultra-faint “hobbit” galaxies and what might be the smallest galaxy ever discovered.
Like cold case investigators, astronomers have used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to uncover evidence of a powerful outburst from the giant black hole at the Milky Way’s center. Astronomers believe a mass equivalent to the planet Mercury was devoured by the black hole about 50 years earlier, causing an X-ray outburst
An international team of scientists has discovered seven — and perhaps eight — dwarf galaxies orbiting Earth’s home galaxy, the Milky Way.
This looks awesome. I wish I had this view from my backyard…
