Observations from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission have revealed a giant wave rippling through the disk of the Milky Way. This image derived from Gaia data shows an edge-on view of our galaxy; ...

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia space telescope has revealed that our Milky Way galaxy has a giant wave rippling outwards from its centre. The unexpected galactic ripple is illustrated in this ...

The Milky Way looks serene from our vantage point, a hazy river of light arcing across the night sky. Yet the stars that make up that glow are quietly telling a more dramatic story, one in which our ...

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 ...

It is well known that the Milky Way rotates around a supermassive black hole, but researchers have found that our galaxy undulates up and down as well like a giant galactic merry-go-round. Katia ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. An award-winning reporter writing about stargazing and the night sky. The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia space telescope has ...

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 ...

Our Milky Way is far from calm — it ripples with a colossal wave spanning tens of thousands of light-years, revealed by ESA’s Gaia telescope. This wave, moving through the galaxy’s disc like ripples ...

So it’s confession time: I’ve been lying to you. I’ve said on many occasions that our Milky Way galaxy has a flat disk (like in this column or this one). But it’s not really flat—not even for a ...

The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), one of the Milky Way’s closest companions, continues to astonish astronomers with its prolific stellar activity and explosive past. A recent visual captured by an ...

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 ...