Gaia's observations of dwarf galaxies, planetless clusters and star streams make us aware of the amount of dark matter in the system. And they suggest that the Milky Way steals stars from passing galaxies. ## Family portrait reveals structure of Melkweg The Melkweg can be divided into three main elements: a thin and a thick disc and a spherical cloud, the halo.
Category: Galaxies
The big bang ebbs slowly into the universe. Clouds of gas and dust collapse under their own gravity to the infernos that we call stars. Planets arise from the debris. A large cloud of stars, planets and even more gas and dust is formed into a giant spiral by gravity.
ABOUT THE MILKWAY CENTER The central part of our galaxy, the Milky Way, can be seen as a luminous band in the sky towards the end of the summer. The galactic center contains up to 20 percent of all mass in our galaxy and is in fact a large disk-shaped swarm consisting of 10 billion stars.
What is the Milky Way? The Milky Way is the galaxy in which our solar system and therefore also the earth is located. The Milky Way contains 200 to 600 billion stars, and all stars that we can see from the Earth are part of it. The Melkweg owes its name to the glowing, milky white band with stars that you can see on a clear night in the sky.
When the astronomers look into the universe through a telescope, they see billions of galaxies with stars, planets and gas, and gas swirls in clouds between the galaxies. But something is missing. What astronomers can see only makes up slightly more than half of all visible matter that the universe should contain.
ABOUT THE VIRGOCLUSTER The zodiac sign Virgo is now high in the sky, so you can see numerous galaxies in the night sky. The Virgo cluster is hidden in the constellation with its 2000 galaxies. These galaxies cannot be seen with the naked eye, but under the right conditions you can observe them with binoculars or, better still, with a small telescope.
Huge dark clouds of star dust float among the stars of the universe. On a clear evening around New Moon, when the moon shines at its weakest, you can see these dark gas clouds, which block the light from the center of the Milky Way, with the naked eye. However, with a telescope you have a much better view of the dark clouds of our galaxy, including the so-called horsehead nebula.
If you count one star per second and do not sleep, eat or do anything else, you have to count for nearly 54 years before you have checked all the luminous spots on the ESA record photo. The Gaia telescope from the European space agency ESA has taken the most detailed photo of the Milky Way ever, with 1.7 billion stars shining on it.
Two galaxies can move away from each other so quickly that it seems that they are moving faster than the light. Not only galaxies have speed, but also the universe itself, which is expanding. As a result, the distance between the systems increases even more. Galaxies themselves are not particularly fast, but the space between them expands like everywhere else in the universe.
With the naked eye it looks like a cloud in the southern night sky. But in reality the Small Magellanic Cloud (Small Magellanic Cloud, SMC) is a dwarf galaxy with hundreds of millions of stars. And now you can view those stars very closely. A team of ambitious scientists took a photo of the galaxy with a resolution of up to 1.6 billion gigapixels - so large that you can zoom in on the individual stars.
The Gaia telescope from the European Space Agency has taken the most detailed photo of the Milky Way so far, on which 1.7 billion stars light up. And of 1.3 billion of these, the telescope has accurately mapped the movements. A team of scientists from the University of California in the US has focused on the large amount of data and focused on one type of star: white dwarfs with a speed of more than 1000 km / s.
The four bright dots in the middle are from the same quasar. The light is deflected by the galaxy in the middle. A quasar occurs when a huge black hole in the center of a galaxy swallows up matter. On the way into the black hole the matter is heated to billions of degrees and it lights up brightly.
See for yourself Mid-October you see the Andromeda system with the naked eye on a clear evening. The star-rich core of the system can be seen as a somewhat vague star high in the sky, a few handwidths southeast of the point directly above you. A telescope with 40x magnification gives you the best experience of the large system, which as a whole covers an area of six times the full moon in the sky.
Gaia's observations of dwarf galaxies, planetless clusters and star streams make us aware of the amount of dark matter in the system. And they suggest that the Milky Way steals stars from passing galaxies. ## Family portrait reveals structure of Melkweg The Melkweg can be divided into three main elements: a thin and a thick disc and a spherical cloud, the halo.