Strong Spiral Magnetic Fields Discovered at the Edge of the Milky Way’s Central Black Hole
In 2022 scientists unveiled the first image of Sgr A* at press conferences around the world, including at the European Southern Observatory (ESO). While the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, which is roughly 27 000 light-years away from Earth, is more than a thousand times smaller and less massive than M87’s, the first-ever black hole […]
Ancient Currents that Formed the Milky Way are Clarified.
ESA’s Gaia space telescope has further disentangled the history of our galaxy, discovering two surprising streams of stars that formed and wove together over 12 billion years ago. The two streams, named Shakti and Shiva, helped form the infant Milky Way. Both are so ancient they likely formed before even the oldest parts of […]
Webb Reveals New Features in Heart of the Milky Way
Amid the estimated 500,000 stars in the image is a cluster of protostars – stars that are still forming and gaining mass – producing outflows that glow like a bonfire in the midst of an infrared-dark cloud. At the heart of this young cluster is a previously known, massive protostar over 30 times the mass […]