Every time we see amazing photos of galaxies or planetary disks, we can see most of the detail since we see them face on. But since the orientation of spiral galaxies in the universe is random, there are a plethora of galaxies ignored by image processors since we just can’t see much of the detail. We can still learn from edge-on spiral galaxies, just not as much as we can from those that are face on. We can see some fascinating dust lanes in the image above, and a ton of detail considering the view, but we don’t know what...
Remember the big picture of Andromeda that showed 100 Million stars? That image resulted in a ton of new galaxy discoveries. Most of these new galaxies were once hidden beyond the Andromeda galaxy, but with the super high resolution image, astronomers and the public were able to look straight through and see far more distant objects. Most images of galaxies have what we call ‘field stars’ in them. These are some of the 400 Billion stars of the Milky Way that are far closer than the galaxy we are imaging. For this reason, galaxy images tend to look very cluttered...
Our planet orbits the Sun. 365.25 days to go full circle (ellipse actually) and bring the seasons to Earth. But the Sun is not really stationary, it’s actually moving through space. It’s orbiting the center of the Milky Way, along with the rest of the galaxy. It actually has a periodic motion as it moves around the Galaxy, slowly moving up above the galactic plane then being pulled back down below by the disk stars. Currently, the Sun is moving toward the constellation Hercules at a speed of around 72,000 Km/h. It is also moving up to the top of the...
Massive stars and low-mass stars live different lives. They are born in different environments, fuse different elements during the course of their lives, release different amounts of radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum, die in different ways, and enrich interstellar space with different metals. We see stars at all stages of life in the galaxy, and their study allows us to piece together how stars form, and how the rarest ones are different. The image above shows two distinct clouds, both about 5,000 light years away in the constellation Cygnus, along the Galactic plane. The smaller bubble on the left, literally...
The observations of our galaxy throughout history have told us that our Milky Way is roughly 100,000 light years across. A number confirmed time and time again by scientists with better and better instruments. But recently a team from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, USA, published a paper challenged that idea, saying the galaxy is much bigger, up to 150,000 light years in diameter. They used the Sloan Digital Sky Survey’s (SDSS) data to look at the distribution of stars outward from the centre of the galaxy, in reference the the galactic plane. They discovered that the stellar distributions oscillated...
