Years ago, astronomers started working on a comprehensive map of the Milky Way by observing it from the European Southern Observatory, an intergovernmental research organization located in Chile.

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This collage highlights a small selection of regions of the Milky Way imaged as part of the most ... [+] detailed infrared map ever of our galaxy. Here we see, from left to right and top to bottom ...

The result is an unprecedented large-scale 3D map of the galaxy. And that map shows that the edges of the Milky way bend slightly, giving it a warped S shape. "Our map shows the Milky Way disk is ...

While stellar surveys continue to expand in volume, our view of the Milky Way remains severely obscured, with the vast majority of stars we can study concentrated around the Sun. This discrepancy ...

Scientists have uncovered the existence of a binary star system close to the black hole near the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

The new three dimensional map has been published in the journal Science. The popular picture of the Milky Way as a flat disc is based on the observation of 2.5 million stars out of a possible 2.5 ...

The total mass of the Milky Way is estimated to be only two hundred billion times that of the sun (2.06 x 10 11 solar masses), marking a significant downward revision—approximately four to five ...