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“Beautiful as it is, our Universe is constantly evolving, often through violent events like the Milky Way’s forthcoming collision with the Large Magellanic Cloud,” said Carlos Frenk, Director of the Institute for Computational Cosmology at the University of Durham. “Barring any disasters, like a major disturbance to the Solar System, our descendants, if any, are in for a treat: a spectacular display of cosmic fireworks as the newly awakened supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, Sagittarius A*, reacts by emitting jets of extremely bright energetic radiation.”
Editor, Jackie Faherty, astrophysicist, Senior Scientist with AMNH. Jackie was formerly a NASA Hubble Fellow at the Carnegie Institution for Science. Aside from a love of scientific research, she is a passionate educator and can often be found giving public lectures in the Hayden Planetarium. Her research team has won multiple grants from NASA, NSF, and the Heising Simons foundation to support projects focused on characterising planet-like objects. She has also co-founded the popular citizen science project entitled Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 which invites the general public to help scan the solar neighbourhood for previously missed cold worlds. A Google Scholar, Faherty has over 100 peer reviewed articles in astrophysical journals and has been an invited speaker at universities and conferences across the globe. Jackie received the 2020 Vera Rubin Early Career Prize from the American Astronomical Society, an award that recognises scientists who have made an impact in the field of dynamical astronomy and the 2021 Robert H Goddard Award for science accomplishments.
An enormous “something” more massive than a star, appears to have torn a hole in part of the Milky Way’s halo. The “dark substructure” was found in data from Gaia spacecraft observations—a mission producing the most detailed 3D map of our galaxy—with Harvard’s Ana Bonaca noticing a perturbation in a tidal stream. Bonaca is a leading authority on how the tidal field of the Milky Way galaxy disrupts globular clusters, and what the resulting debris can tell us about the underlying distribution of dark matter. (more…)
A team of researchers using the Subaru Telescope identified the outermost edge of the Milky Way –the boundary of the stellar system that makes up the galaxy. Its ultimate size is 520,000 light years in radius, 20 times larger than the 26,000 light years between the galactic center and our solar system. The galaxy is so big that it is impossible to identify the halo traces located at the outer boundary using 2.5 to four-meter telescopes.
The Galaxy Report newsletter brings you daily news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and add a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.
New Insights from a Dark-Matter-Free Galaxy Revives Controversial Gravity Theory (Weekend Feature)
Could An Alien Civilization Change the Laws of Physics to Gravity Powered Batteries (Planet Earth Report)
Our Sun as Never Seen Before (and a New Discovery)
Did the Milky Way Lose Its Original Black Hole to Will the James Webb Space Telescope Reveal Another Earth? (The Galaxy Report)
Radio Galaxies of the Early Universe -Would Take Several Million Years to Cross at Speed of Light
Before the “Bang” –The Primordial Universe NASA Probing How Life Began on Earth to Alpha Centauri a Billion Years Older than Our Solar System (The Galaxy Report)“Simultaneously Beautiful and Terrifying” –First Image of Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole to A New Earth Rises (Planet Earth Report)Extraterrestrial Lighthouses to Harvard’s Avi Loeb & Company On Our Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole Image (The Galaxy Report)
Earth’s Astronomers on the Significance of the First Image of Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole
