Sometime between 8 and 11 billion years ago, the Milky Way crashed into a dwarf galaxy that astronomers call the Gaia Sausage. You will not see the Gaia Sausage today. As far as astronomers know, its ...

There's a 50% chance that the predicted head-on collision will end in a galactic merger, according to a new study. Reading time 2 minutes For decades, astronomers have predicted that, in approximately ...

The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy. More specifically, it is a barred spiral galaxy, meaning that within its central region, there is a bar shape off of which the spirals emanate. About two-thirds of ...

This illustration shows the orbits of stars very close to Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. Despite their ancient ages, some stars orbiting the Milky Way’s ...

Densely packed, fast-moving stars at the Milky Way's center can collide with each other. New research uses simulations to explore the outcomes of these collisions. Some collisions are more like ...