The new data released by the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission has revealed the surprise phenomena of ‘starquakes’—massive ...

Most of the stars in our Milky Way galaxy sit neatly on a flat plane. But the space around our galaxy is much more chaotic. Rogue bands of stars called "stellar streams" orbit the Milky Way much like ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. An award-winning reporter writing about stargazing and the night sky. When will the Milky Way collide with the Andromeda Galaxy?

The Milky Way absorbed a large dwarf galaxy about 12 billion years ago, pushing the known history of major galactic mergers ...

Swirling through the Milky Way's central zone, in the turbulent region surrounding the supermassive black hole at the core of our galaxy, dust and gases constantly churn as energetic shock waves ...

From this vantage point looking at the Milky Way from its edge, the galactic bulge might appear as a glowing orb of stars, with the spiral arms and their dust clouds forming a narrow band. Credit: ESO ...

The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy containing 100-400 billion stars. Planet Earth sits along one of the galaxy’s spiral arms. Though the Milky Way is generally always visible from Earth, certain times ...

A giant cloud of gas near the center of the Milky Way has surprised astronomers with its incredible chemical richness. Inside G+0.633-0.0604, researchers found more than 120 different molecules. The ...

A new James Webb Space Telescope study finds that Sagittarius A*, the Milky Way's central black hole, constantly emits light from its swirling accretion disk. Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / Ralf Crawford ...

The galaxy our planet inhabits is called the Milky Way for the simple reason that, as seen from our world, its impossible-to-count collection of stars looks like a band of milky white light. In all ...

Look up on a dark night and the Milky Way appears as a calm band of stars across the sky. But our galaxy has a violent past. For more than 13 billion years it has grown through star formation and ...