This collage highlights a small selection of regions of the Milky Way imaged as part of the most ... [+] detailed infrared map ever of our galaxy. Here we see, from left to right and top to bottom ...

"It marks an exciting step forward in our understanding of dark matter and the dynamics of the Milky Way." A perplexing "break" in a stream of stars around the Milky Way could be the result of ...

Shapley determined that the Milky Way was 300,000 light years across ... His subsequent tuning-fork diagram of the shapes of galaxies remains a classic teaching tool for astronomers, and even ...

Our Milky Way is a spiral galaxy rotating around a central point. Our Sun is on one of the spiral arms as shown in the diagram: The Sun's orbital speed is determined almost entirely by the ...

This illustration shows a stage in the predicted merger between our Milky Way galaxy and the ... [+] neighboring Andromeda galaxy, as it will unfold over the next several billion years.