For billions of years before reaching its current location, the Sun may have slowly travelled as part of a large group, or “wave,” of stars drifting out from the inner parts of the Milky Way. This ...

Chinese astronomers have found a pair of young star clusters formed within a circumgalactic high-velocity cloud on the outskirts of the Milky Way—the first direct evidence of star formation in such an ...

In A Nutshell Scientists have identified 6,594 solar twins, stars nearly identical to our Sun, in the largest model-driven catalog of its kind ever assembled. Each star was assigned an estimated age, ...

An international research team has found that the Milky Way and its galactic neighbors appear to sit inside a vast, flat concentration of dark matter, a structure stretching roughly 10 megaparsecs and ...

Each spring, amateur astronomers attempt the ultimate stargazing challenge—an overnight quest to spot every galaxy, nebula, and star cluster in Charles Messier’s famous catalog. Photographer Alan Dyer ...

Forces have mediator particles. Electromagnetism is mediated by the photons, for example. So most of the decay of this excited dark matter particle would be this unknown mediator. The excited state ...

Some people now have an A.I. bestie. Some have a husband. Some have three. Adrianne Brookins is, by her own account, an “old ...

The oldest stars in the Milky Way are forcing a fresh look at one of cosmology’s biggest arguments. If some of them are about 13.

Astronomers produced the most complete map of the center of the Milky Way, which can provide insight into how stars and planets are formed.

For decades, astronomers wondered why most nearby galaxies are speeding away from the Milky Way instead of being pulled in by its gravity. New simulations reveal the answer: our galaxy sits in a ...

Most of the (dark) matter beyond the Local Group of galaxies (which includes the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy) must be ...