The older stars migrated out from the galactic center, leaving the younger ones inside.

Scientists have captured the most complete, high-resolution map of the cold gas at the center of the Milky Way, which contains the raw material from which stars and planets are made. Information from ...

How far the Milky Way's disc extends has long been difficult to define — it doesn't end sharply, but fades away gradually at its outer edges. Now, for the first time, an international team of ...

The Milky Way is not the calm, flat starry disk many of us learned about in school. Astronomers are now tracking a colossal, curling disturbance that ripples through our Galaxy’s disk, lifting and ...

Scientists at Johns Hopkins may be closing in on dark matter’s elusive trail, uncovering a mysterious gamma ray glow at the heart of our galaxy that could signal unseen matter colliding — or perhaps ...

Well, it’s confession time: I’ve been lying to you. I’ve said on many occasions in this column that our Milky Way galaxy has a flat disk. But it’s not really flat—not according to any reasonable ...

A group of undergraduate students stumbled into a cosmic time capsule—one of the oldest stars ever discovered—while combing through massive astronomy datasets. What began as a class project quickly ...

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 ...

It may be our galactic neighborhood, but it is not always easy to see. However, that is about to change. For the next several months, the iconic band of hazy light, known as the Milky Way, should ...