The Milky Way should have at least 36 intelligent alien civilizations active right now, according to a new study. There could be hundreds of extraterrestrial civilizations active in the galaxy at this very moment, if life that can broadcast through space lasts longer than 100 years. Finding those aliens could […]

Astronomers discovered a cluster of thousands of young stars appearing in the most ancient reaches of the Milky Way. The new stars seem to come from two nearby galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, which are on track to crash into our galaxy in 2 or 3 billion years. […]

The Milky Way is on track to collide and merge with its nearest neighbour, the Andromeda galaxy, in about 4 billion years. The galaxies will pass through each other, get snapped back together by gravity, and eventually merge cores. NASA illustrations show what the arrival of an entire galaxy of […]

The NASA scientist Jessie Christiansen made a video that traces our solar system’s movement through the Milky Way as dinosaurs emerged, went extinct, and were replaced by mammals on Earth. Our sun orbits the galaxy’s centre, so many dinosaurs roamed the Earth while the planet was on the other side […]

As Earth rotates on its axis, it orbits the sun, which orbits the centre of the Milky Way, which itself is barreling through space. A simple animation by the former NASA scientist James O’Donoghue shows how fast all those objects are moving. Earth is relatively slow, but against the background […]

A NASA photo captured the centre of the Milky Way galaxy in infrared light. The image shows the galactic centre in unprecedented detail, but NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will produce even better photos. JWST’s powerful infrared cameras might even capture the disk of hot matter swirling around […]

NASA‘s Hubble Space Telescope revealed the remnants of a huge explosion near the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy, which occurred just 3.5 million years ago. In galactic timescales, that’s recent. Ancient human ancestors lived across Africa at the time. Video of an artist’s interpretation shows how […]

The team of scientists that captured the first-ever photo of a black hole is turning to its next project: video. The Event Horizon Telescope team plans to produce hours of real-time video footage of the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy, along with time-lapse videos […]

Earlier this year, Milky Way announced it is officially adding a Salted Caramel flavour to its lineup in 2020. I tasted the new bar and compared it to the original Milky Way and Milky Way Simply Caramel. Overall, the Salted Caramel bar didn’t taste as salty as I thought it […]

The Milky Way could be teeming with extraterrestrial civilizations that have spread across the stars, according to a new study. The study offers new perspectives on the Fermi Paradox, which asks why we haven’t found signs of intelligent extraterrestrials in our galaxy. There are plenty of scenarios in which aliens […]

A large-scale 3D map of the Milky Way shows its warped shape with a new level of detail and accuracy. Researchers measured the distances between our sun and 2,400 stars to map their three-dimensional coordinates across the Milky Way. Scientists still don’t know how our galaxy and others like it […]

Scientists once thought that travelling into a black hole would kill you. But now, physicists have run computer simulations to show that certain types of black holes – large, rotating ones – could serve as portals for hyperspace travel. Some physicists believe that you’d arrive at a remote part of […]

Deep in the mountains of Central Idaho lies one of the darkest nighttime spots in the US. The International Dark-Sky Association, a nonprofit led by two astronomers, has declared a 1,416-square-mile area in Idaho’s Sawtooth National Recreation Area as the country’s first gold-certified Dark Sky Reserve. That means the central […]

Astronomer Juan Carlos Muñoz-Mateos took a photo of the Milky Way through a crystal ball. The image shows our galaxy projected through the orb of glass like a celestial marble. Muñoz-Mateos, who works at a telescope in Chile, said photos of taken through water droplets inspired his shot. A stunning […]

The universe is enormous -- so vast that...

Robbert Dijkgraaf is a theoretical physicist...

A new study is changing the way we understand...