http://www.physorg.com/ en-us Physorg.com internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Physics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. Iowa State University's Martin Pohl is part of a research team that has developed the first complete map of the Milky Way galaxy's spiral arms. The map shows the inner part of the Milky Way has two prominent, symmetric spiral arms, which extend into the outer galaxy where they branch into four spiral arms. http://www.physorg.com/news150365610.html Space & Earth Mon, 05 Jan 2009 08:13:30 EST news150365610 New, very precise measurements have shown that the rotation of the Milky Way is simpler than previously thought. A remarkable result from the most successful ESO instrument HARPS, shows that a much debated, apparent 'fall' of neighbourhood Cepheid stars towards our Sun stems from an intrinsic property of the Cepheids themselves. http://www.physorg.com/news141045997.html Space & Earth Fri, 19 Sep 2008 12:26:37 EST news141045997 (PhysOrg.com) -- It sounds like the plot of a sci-fi movie: rogue black holes roaming our galaxy, threatening to swallow anything that gets too close. In fact, new calculations by Ryan O'Leary and Avi Loeb (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) suggest that hundreds of massive black holes, left over from the galaxy-building days of the early universe, may wander the Milky Way. http://www.physorg.com/news160223196.html Space & Earth Wed, 29 Apr 2009 11:27:35 EST news160223196 (PhysOrg.com) -- The center of the Milky Way presents astronomers with a paradox: it holds young stars, but no one is sure how those stars got there. The galactic center is wracked with powerful gravitational tides stirred by a 4 million solar-mass black hole. Those tides should rip apart molecular clouds that act as stellar nurseries, preventing stars from forming in place. Yet the alternative - stars falling inward after forming elsewhere - should be a rare occurrence. http://www.physorg.com/news150383551.html Space & Earth Mon, 05 Jan 2009 13:12:31 EST news150383551 Astronomers have found that stars of a recently discovered type, dubbed ultracool subdwarfs, take some pretty wild rides as they orbit around the Milky Way, following paths that are very different from those of typical stars. One of them may actually be a visitor that originated in another galaxy. http://www.physorg.com/news163782043.html Space & Earth Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:02:01 EST news163782043 NASA has awarded Clemson astronomers $244,000 to use data from several space-based gamma-ray telescopes to study a mysterious emission coming from the central regions of the Milky Way galaxy. http://www.physorg.com/news154008823.html Space & Earth Mon, 16 Feb 2009 12:14:49 EST news154008823 (PhysOrg.com) -- ESO has released a striking new image of a nearby galaxy that many astronomers think closely resembles our own Milky Way. Though the galaxy is seen edge-on, observations of NGC 4945 suggest that this hive of stars is a spiral galaxy much like our own, with swirling, luminous arms and a bar-shaped central region. These resemblances aside, NGC 4945 has a brighter centre that likely harbours a supermassive black hole, which is devouring reams of matter and blasting energy out into space. http://www.physorg.com/news171105483.html Space & Earth Wed, 02 Sep 2009 10:30:06 EST news171105483 In the new ESO image, Barnard's Galaxy glows beneath a sea of foreground stars in the direction of the constellation of Sagittarius (the Archer). At the relatively close distance of about 1.6 million light-years, Barnard's Galaxy is a member of the Local Group, the archipelago of galaxies that includes our home, the Milky Way. The nickname of NGC 6822 comes from its discoverer, the American astronomer Edward Emerson Barnard, who first spied this visually elusive cosmic islet using a 125-millimetre aperture refractor in 1884. http://www.physorg.com/news174718249.html Space & Earth Wed, 14 Oct 2009 05:52:04 EST news174718249 (PhysOrg.com) -- Fasten your seat belts -- we're faster, heavier, and more likely to collide than we thought. Astronomers making high-precision measurements of the Milky Way say our home Galaxy is rotating about 100,000 miles per hour faster than previously understood. http://www.physorg.com/news150384799.html Space & Earth Mon, 05 Jan 2009 13:33:19 EST news150384799 Penn State astronomers have used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to produce a new image of a ghostly exploded star with an unusual shape in a galaxy near the Milky Way. Astronomers think the object may be the remains of a white-dwarf star that disintegrated in a thermonuclear explosion, known as a Type Ia supernova, but it does not look like other likely Type ia remnants found in our own Milky Way galaxy. http://www.physorg.com/news164425176.html Space & Earth Wed, 17 Jun 2009 04:20:01 EST news164425176 (PhysOrg.com) -- Just in time for the holidays: a Hubble Space Telescope picture postcard of hundreds of brilliant blue stars wreathed by warm, glowing clouds. The festive portrait is the most detailed view of the largest stellar nursery in our local galactic neighborhood. http://www.physorg.com/news180118620.html Space & Earth Tue, 15 Dec 2009 17:10:02 EST news180118620 (PhysOrg.com) -- Ultraluminous infrared galaxies ((ULIRGs) are galaxies whose luminosity exceeds that of a trillion suns; for comparison, the Milky Way galaxy has a typical (and much more modest) luminosity of only about ten billion suns. ULIRGs were discovered by an all-sky infrared survey satellite in the 1980's, and since then the origin(s) of their huge infrared emission has been widely debated. Extreme infrared activity is known to be associated with interacting galaxies, and optical imaging indeed shows that many ULIRGs are in collision, but this fact does not answer the question of what physical mechanism powers the luminosity. Might the same process be underway at a low level in our galaxy? http://www.physorg.com/news178544948.html Space & Earth Fri, 27 Nov 2009 11:55:01 EST news178544948 (PhysOrg.com) -- A study published this week in the journal Nature offers an explanation for the origin of dwarf spheroidal galaxies. The research may settle an outstanding puzzle in understanding galaxy formation. http://www.physorg.com/news168095945.html Space & Earth Wed, 29 Jul 2009 15:20:01 EST news168095945 (PhysOrg.com) -- Our Milky Way galaxy only survived because it was already immersed in a large clump of dark matter which trapped gases inside it, scientists led by Durham University's Institute for Computational Cosmology (ICC) found. http://www.physorg.com/news165645175.html Space & Earth Wed, 01 Jul 2009 05:33:27 EST news165645175 (PhysOrg.com) -- A 25-year old astronomical mystery has been solved: Most of the diffuse X-ray emissions in the Milky Way do not originate from one single source but from so-called white dwarfs and from stars with active outer gas layers. Mikhail Revnivtsev from the Excellence Cluster Universe at the TU Munich and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, the Space Research Institute in Moscow and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge have now succeeded in proving this. http://www.physorg.com/news160755456.html Space & Earth Tue, 05 May 2009 15:18:02 EST news160755456