To make maps of these structures, astronomers turn to individual stars. Each star’s composition records its birthplace, age, and natal ingredients, so studying starlight enables a form of galactic cartography—as well as genealogy. By situating stars in time and place, astronomers can retrace history and infer how the Milky Way was built, piece by piece, […]
Read MoreAfter two years of data-taking and number-crunching, a team of astronomers has dropped a snapshot of, quite literally, cosmic proportions. It’s chock-full of stellar goodness: The image shows the reddish-brown dust clouds clumped along the centerline of our Milky Way teeming with over 3 billion pinpricks of light—nearly all stars, a faint neighboring galaxy here […]
Read MoreOn May 12, at nine simultaneous press conferences around the world, astrophysicists revealed the first image of the black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. At first, awesome though it was, the painstakingly produced image of the ring of light around our galaxy’s central pit of darkness seemed to merely prove what experts […]
Read MoreOne iPhone 14 rumor that never panned out was some sort of astrophotography feature, but that hasn’t stopped users from showcasing just what the camera on iPhone 14 Pro models can do when pointed at the night sky. These fantastic shots shared by MacRumors forum member ToddH were taken using an iPhone 14 Pro Max […]
Read MoreAstronomers have naturally focused their telescopes on the part of the universe closest to us, since those stars and galaxies can be examined in the greatest detail. But astrophysicists have sometimes struggled to square the population of our own galactic neighborhood with dark-matter theories. For example, earlier models predicted more neighboring galaxies than have actually […]
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