Milky Way – आवारा मुसाफिर

Astronomers take the first close-up picture of a star outside our galaxy

November 21, 2024115 Views

“For the first time, we have succeeded in taking a zoomed-in image of a dying star in a galaxy outside our own Milky Way,” says Keiichi Ohnaka, an astrophysicist from Universidad Andrés Bello in Chile. Located a staggering 160 000 light-years from us, the star WOH G64 was imaged thanks to the impressive sharpness offered by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (ESO’s VLTI). The new observations reveal a star puffing out gas and dust, in the last stages before it becomes a supernova. This is an image of the star WOH G64, taken by the GRAVITY instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (ESO’s VLTI). The bright oval at the centre of this image is a dusty cocoon that enshrouds the star. A fainter elliptical ring a...

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Most detailed infrared map ever of our Milky Way captured

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September 26, 2024154 Views

Astronomers have published a gigantic infrared map of the Milky Way containing more than 1.5 billion objects ― the most detailed one ever made. Using the European Southern Observatory’s VISTA telescope, the team monitored the central regions of our Galaxy over more than 13 years. At 500 terabytes of data, this is the largest observational project ever carried out with an ESO telescope. “We made so many discoveries, we have changed the view of our Galaxy forever,” says Dante Minniti, an astrophysicist at Universidad Andrés Bello in Chile who led the overall project. This image shows the regions of the Milky Way mapped by the VISTA Variables in the Vía Láctea (VVV) survey and its companion project, the VVV eXtended survey (VVVX). The total area covered is equivalent to 8600 full moons...

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Most massive stellar black hole in our galaxy found

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April 17, 2024469 Views

Astronomers have identified the most massive stellar black hole yet discovered in the Milky Way galaxy. This black hole was spotted in data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission because it imposes an odd ‘wobbling’ motion on the companion star orbiting it. Data from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) and other ground-based observatories were used to verify the mass of the black hole, putting it at an impressive 33 times that of the Sun. Stellar black holes are formed from the collapse of massive stars and the ones previously identified in the Milky Way are on average about 10 times as massive as the Sun. Even the next most massive stellar black hole known in our galaxy, Cygnus X-1, only reaches 21 solar masses, making this new 33-solar-mass obs...

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With neutrinos, scientists observe our galaxy in a whole new way

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June 30, 2023780 Views

Human beings for millennia have gazed with awe at the vast torrent of stars - bright and dim - shining in Earth's night sky that comprise the Milky Way. Our home galaxy, however, is now being observed for the first time in a brand new way. Scientists said on Thursday they have produced an image of the Milky Way not based on electromagnetic radiation - light - but on ghostly subatomic particles called neutrinos. They detected high-energy neutrinos in pristine ice deep below Antarctica's surface, then traced their source back to locations in the Milky Way - the first time these particles have been observed arising from our galaxy. An artist's composition of the Milky Way seen with a neutrino lens (blue) is shown in this undated handout image. Collaboration/U.S. National Science Founda...

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Astronomers discover Milky Way galaxy’s most-distant stars

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January 12, 20231030 Views

Astronomers have detected in the stellar halo that represents the Milky Way's outer limits a group of stars more distant from Earth than any known within our own galaxy - almost halfway to a neighboring galaxy. The researchers said these 208 stars inhabit the most remote reaches of the Milky Way's halo, a spherical stellar cloud dominated by the mysterious invisible substance called dark matter that makes itself known only through its gravitational influence. The furthest of them is 1.08 million light years from Earth. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km). An undated illustration shows the Milky Way galaxy's inner and outer halos. A halo is a spherical cloud of stars surrounding a galaxy. NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI)/Handout v...

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Astronomers detect hot gas bubble swirling around the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole

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September 24, 2022181 Views

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers have spotted signs of a ‘hot spot’ orbiting Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the centre of our galaxy. The finding helps us better understand the enigmatic and dynamic environment of our supermassive black hole. “We think we're looking at a hot bubble of gas zipping around Sagittarius A* on an orbit similar in size to that of the planet Mercury, but making a full loop in just around 70 minutes. This requires a mind blowing velocity of about 30% of the speed of light!” says Maciek Wielgus of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, who led the study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics. This shows a still image of the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*, as seen by the Event Hori...

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Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the heart of our galaxy

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May 12, 2022375 Views

Today, at simultaneous press conferences around the world, including at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) headquarters in Germany, astronomers have unveiled the first image of the supermassive black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy. This result provides overwhelming evidence that the object is indeed a black hole and yields valuable clues about the workings of such giants, which are thought to reside at the centre of most galaxies. The image was produced by a global research team called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, using observations from a worldwide network of radio telescopes. The image is a long-anticipated look at the massive object that sits at the very centre of our galaxy. Scientists had previously seen stars orbiting around something invi...

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Black hole hunters cast gaze at center of the Milky Way galaxy

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May 10, 2022307 Views

Residing at the center of our spiral-shaped Milky Way galaxy is a beast - a supermassive black hole possessing 4 million times the mass of our sun and consuming any material including gas, dust and stars straying within its immense gravitational pull. Scientists have been using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a global network of observatories working collectively to observe radio sources associated with black holes, to study this Milky Way denizen and have set an announcement for Thursday that signals they may finally have secured an image of it. The black hole is called Sagittarius A*, or SgrA*. First image of a black hole, captured by scientists using Event Horizon Telescope observations of the center of the galaxy M87. The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the...

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Who is sending these strange radio signals from space!

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October 15, 2021430 Views

A variable signal aligned to the heart of the Milky Way is tantalising scientists Astronomers have discovered unusual signals coming from the direction of the Milky Way’s centre. The radio waves fit no currently understood pattern of variable radio source and could suggest a new class of stellar object. “The strangest property of this new signal is that it is has a very high polarisation. This means its light oscillates in only one direction, but that direction rotates with time,” said Ziteng Wang, lead author of the new study and a PhD student in the School of Physics at the University of Sydney. “The brightness of the object also varies dramatically, by a factor of 100, and the signal switches on and off apparently at random. We’ve never seen anything like it.”&...

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AstroSat helps spot rare UV-bright stars in a massive cosmic dinosaur in the Milky Way

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January 22, 2021545 Views

Astronomers exploring the massive intriguing globular cluster in our Galaxy called NGC 2808 that is said to have at least five generations of stars have spotted rare hot UV-bright stars in it. These stars whose inner core is almost exposed, making them very hot, exist in the late stages of evolution of a Sun-like star. It is not clear how these stars end their lives as not many of them are detected in these fast-evolving phases, making their study crucial. A false colour image of the globular cluster NGC 2808 obtained using AstroSat/UVIT. The stars as seen using far-UV (FUV) filter are shown in blue colour, and the yellow colour is used to show the stars observed in near-UV (NUV). Motivated by the fact that old globular clusters referred to as dinosaurs of the universe present excel...