#SciFi#Book#Idea 472… there is a stream of gas going from the Magellanic Clouds (dwarf galaxies of the Milky Way) towards the Milky Way and astronomers have found 13 stars in that stream traversing the chasm heading towards the Milky Way. Wouldn’t it be a cool setting for a Sci Fi novel? Where is my typewriter?! #Astronomy#Galaxy#Novel#MilkyWay#Magellan
Winter #Solstice today for those of us on the north end. I don’t have any “solsticey” photos but thinking celestial I have this one of the #MilkyWay that I took while in N. #California last August. Our solar system orbits around the galactic center once every ~225 million years so if there was an equivalent galactic “winter solstice” point there have only been about 20 of them since our sun was but a wee protostar and all of us were just a glint in its eye.
Interesting map of the light pollution in UK. I was impressed to see sky in the night near #Pentraeth to compare with south England. But according the map there are places with even darker sky. :-)
🥳 Today the #GaiaMission celebrates the 10th anniversary of its launch 🛰🚀
In this 10 years, Gaia has been revolutionary, not only mapping #stars in the #MilkyWay with unprecedented accuracy, but also producing exquisite data for objects from solar system #asteroids to distant lensed #quasars!
Congratulations to #GaiaDPAC and all other #ESA people that made and make this mission a success!
Read here about 10 #science topics where Gaia has made its impact:
7️⃣7️⃣5️⃣0️⃣0️⃣0️⃣ views for Dr Becky Smethurst's video on the effect of Laniakea on Cosmology. Such a huge interest for such a niche subject; what a fantastic work is doing Dr. Becky!
Given its latitude, from ESO's Paranal Observatory in #Chile you can see the core of the #MilkyWay passing directly overhead. In this pic I took a few years ago you can see its faint glow reflected off the dome of one of our 8 m telescopes.
My neck wasn't happy when framing this shot, though, as my camera doesn't have a flip screen! 😅
A new study on the origin of Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays using the Cosmicflows-inferred density field of the Local Universe as baseline source distribution
A new paper by Merrow et al. claims that, rather than a transient structure arising more recently through secular evolution, the Milky Way's bar may have resulted from its last major merger event some 8-11 Ga ago.
Spiral galaxies like our Milky Way are mysteriously hard to come by in our cosmic backyard. Why that is has remained a mystery, but a team of astronomers think they’ve finally figured it out. Live Science explains: https://flip.it/ok7W7r #Science#Space#SpaceExploration#MilkyWay
The Big Numbers argument notes that our #galaxy, the #MilkyWay 🌌, has something like 400 billion #stars 🎇, and it’s just one of untold billions of galaxies in a #universe that might be infinite. Moreover, in the past 30 years, astronomers have discovered that #planets 🪐 of all shapes and sizes are common in the universe.
With so much turf out there, even the most frowny-faced skeptic must admit it’s hard to run the numbers 📊 in a 13.8 billion-year-old universe like ours and wind up with just one self-aware, technological, #telescope 🔭-constructing species.
The universe is not about us, and what happened on this planet over the past 4 billion years could happen elsewhere.