One of the largest and brightest star clusters in the Milky Way galaxy is the Arches cluster, and its easy to see why. Lying only 100 light years away from the supermassive black hole that lies in the heart of our galaxy, it formed in an incredibly dense environment. It lies 25,000 light years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius, and contains thousands of massive stars, including 160 that are hot, young, and exceptionally more massive than the Sun. Only 1 in 10 Million stars in the galaxy are as bright as these massive central 160 stars. Though it is...
When I do a planetarium show for an audience, and they see the night sky for the first time, I always ask them ‘What do you see?’ The response is the usual stuff – Stars, the Moon, maybe planets, or the Milky Way. But they seem to be missing the most important and largest part of the sky – the Darkness. Space itself. Stars light up the cosmos, but if there were no stars, would we think that the universe was empty? Perhaps, but if you can imagine this scenario, it gives you an important perspective when you want to...
It sounds like something out of a science fiction novel. The incredible and rare dark star cluster, hiding the evil super villain’s headquarters. A dark star cluster is something I would imagine as a spooky, eerie type of place where everything you see changes when you enter its space. Science fiction aside, a dark star cluster is real, and it’s a new type of cluster that is similar to the mighty dense globular clusters that orbit most galaxies. Globular clusters orbit in a halo of space around the centres of galaxies, and though our Milky Way harbours 150 of them,...
The Andromeda Galaxy is the closest large spiral to our own Milky Way, and the only major Galaxy moving toward us. Turns out its on a direct collision course, but we still have 3.5 Billion years to prepare, so its not exactly pressing news. On the plus side, studying Andromeda allows us to infer properties of more distant galaxies, and it gives us a map of what our own Milky Way Galaxy may look like. Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered a giant halo of gas around Andromeda, and the Milky Way may have a similar one. By...
As we push the limits of our technology, we naturally will find the biggest, the brightest, the smallest, the most extreme, and of course the most distant objects in the universe. We are at the time in history where we are beginning to see the edges of our universe in unprecedented detail. Eventually will will stop finding the biggest, brightest, and most distant, after which point our technology will serve to improve our precision and allow us to peer within these unique objects. Astronomers have used this incredible technology to discover the most distant galaxy in the universe, forming only...
Some pictures speak volumes, and some have interesting hidden details that we don’t always see from the outset. A stunning photo of the Milky Way from Taiwan shows more than meets the eye. At first glance, you might notice the fascinating shot of the Milky Way, and you may even pick up on the fact that the pollution from the distant cities blocks out all stars past a certain point. The prominence of pollution and light pollution are very present in the image. The real gem, however, is to notice the blue clusters of light around the rocks. They are...
When the first stars and galaxies started to form, it was like a spark of a massive chain reaction where the vast amounts of gas and dust that had clumped together were quickly converted into dense, luminous star clusters. This was the beginning of the formation of the heavier elements that would eventually make up all that we see on the planet Earth. But when did this massive tirade of star formation end? When we look at galaxies in the present epoch, most don’t form stars very rapidly at all, and giant elliptical galaxies are all but devoid of gas,...
If there’s one difference I notice between Science and Religion, it’s that when questions come up and something unexpected flies in the face of a well-established principle, Science gets excited, Religion gets defensive. I’m always on the lookout for new data that causes us to rethink the ideas we have, and when I find something, I get excited because it means we’ve found something that has been elusive for a long time. Isaac Asimov said it best: The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny…’ – Isaac Asimov...
A few months ago I talked about Astronomers seeing the gas cloud known as G2 passing the central black hole of the Milky Way, called Sagittarius A*, and how we had hoped to watch the black hole destroy it in order to learn about the behaviour of supermassive black holes. As we all sat and watched the passage of the cloud over the course of a few months, we were surprised to find that the cloud remained intact and passed straight by Sag A*. When we last checked in, the leading theory was that the ‘cloud’ actually was a dense...
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...
