In 1920, astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis held a Great Debate. Shapley argued that the spiral nebulae were small and in the Milky Way, while Curtis took a more radical position that they ...

Astronomers have constructed the first detailed 3D map of the properties of cosmic dust in our home galaxy. For their map, the astronomers used 130 million spectra from ESA's Gaia mission, results ...

The Milky Way is one of the biggest in the observable universe: Even if you traveled at the speed of light, it would take 100,000 years to go from one end of our home galaxy to the other.

"We thought they were basically all going to be fried because the entire universe turned into a vat of boiling oil." ...

Astronomers discover an 850,000 light-year-long cosmic filament in the early universe, providing insights into large-scale ...

When we observe distant celestial objects, there is a possible catch: Is that star I am observing really as reddish as it ...

Voluminous clouds of cosmic dust permeate our galaxy, but only recently has software allowed detailed observations of the ...

For the next 300 years, astronomers assumed that the Milky Way was the entire universe. Charles Messier also produced a catalog of over 100 prominent nebulae in 1781. Messier was interested in ...

The Flame Nebula, located 1,400 light-years from Earth, is a region where many stars are forming and is less than a million ...

Star clusters are formed when gravity pulls young stars together, forcing them to orbit each other. A star cluster can ...

Toward the end of the 18th century, astronomer William Herschel used star counts to map out the Milky Way. He cataloged a thousand new nebulae and clusters of stars. He believed that the nebulae ...

Nature of the nebulae In 1610, astronomer Galileo Galilei used the newly invented telescope to show that the Milky Way was composed of a huge number of faint stars. For the next 300 years ...