Milky Way – Quanta Magazine

Tracing the Hidden Hand of Magnetism in the Galaxy

Jay Bennett — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 14:05:21 +0000

Amid the roilings of the Milky Way, immense pockets of gas coalesce into clouds where stars are born. In this process, there is a hidden hand at play: magnetism. “There’s this fantastic quote: You can measure a man’s ignorance by the strength of his magnetic field,” said Susan Clark, an astrophysicist at Stanford University. “In other words, when we have a piece of a problem historically in...

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The Best Neighborhoods for Starting a Life in the Galaxy

Rebecca Boyle — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 14:37:59 +0000

To harbor life, at least as we know it, a planet must orbit a star that is relatively calm and stable. The planet’s orbit must also be nearly circular so the planet experiences similar warmth throughout its year. And it must be not too hot, lest any surface water boil off; not too cold, lest that water remain locked in ice; but just right, so that rivers and seas remain liquid.

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In the Milky Way’s Stars, a History of Violence

Rebecca Boyle — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 14:10:05 +0000

Late in the evening of October 5, 1923, Edwin Hubble sat at the eyepiece of the Hooker telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory, atop the mountains overlooking the Los Angeles basin. He was observing an object in the northern sky. To the unaided eye, it was visible as a faint smudge. But through a telescope it sharpened into a brilliant ellipse called the Andromeda Nebula. To settle a debate...

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Astronomers Dig Up the Stars That Birthed the Milky Way

Lyndie Chiou — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 13:37:09 +0000

For around 20 years, astronomers have struggled to find an ancient group of stars mixed in with the gas, dust and newer stars of our galaxy’s bulge. These “fossil” stars preceded the Milky Way and should have been discernible by their distinctive chemistry and orbits. Yet until recently, only a small number of them had ever been found. Now, a determined effort using data-intensive machine learning...

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Cosmic Map of Ultrahigh-Energy Particles Points to Long-Hidden Treasures

Natalie Wolchover — Tue, 27 Apr 2021 15:46:27 +0000

In the 1930s, the French physicist Pierre Auger placed Geiger counters along a ridge in the Alps and observed that they would sometimes spontaneously click at the same time, even when they were up to 300 meters apart. He knew that the coincident clicks came from cosmic rays, charged particles from space that bang into air molecules in the sky, triggering particle showers that rain down to the...

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