If you look up on a clear night from a darksky location, you might see the Milky Way as a faint band of thousands of stars. But these sparkling lights are just a tiny fraction of our cosmic ...

The Gaia mission, launched by the European Space Agency, has completed a decade of groundbreaking astronomical observations, collecting over three trillion data points on two billion stars and ...

Conflicting distance measurements have added to the uncertainty. One data source places one object at 6,500 light years away, ...

Radio galaxies already feature mind-bending physics, with supermassive black holes accreting matter at the galactic core and sending out vast plasma jets that glow at radio frequencies. Those larger ...

According to NASA, "there are hundreds of them"—massive black holes roaming space. It is now emerging and reshaping the ...

A trio of astronomers from the University of Tokyo and Niigata University have found what they describe as "peculiar embedded ...

A hundred years ago, astronomer Edwin Hubble dramatically expanded the size of the known universe. At a meeting of the ...

Milky Way stars that are high and low in metallicity have been mapped by the ESA Gaia mission. [Gaia spacecraft: Mapping the ...

Astronomers have discovered a giant radio galaxy with plasma jets stretching an incredible 3.3 million light-years—32 times ...

ESA’s decade-long Milky Way Gaia mapping mission still has tons of data to release over the next few years. Expect surprises.

Recent studies challenge the long-held belief that the Milky Way is a standard model for understanding galaxy formation, ...

Gaia was launched on December 19, 2013, and began scanning the stars in July 2014. It mapped over two billion stars, ...