Understanding how the Milky Way formed means looking far beyond the bright spiral you see in the night sky. A new study led ...

A mysterious excess of far-ultraviolet light seen across the Milky Way could come from the annihilation of clumpy dark matter ...

How galaxies assemble their stars and grow over billions of years remains one of the central questions in astronomy. Recent ...

Galaxies from the early Universe are more like our own Milky Way than previously thought, flipping the entire narrative of how scientists think about structure formation in the Universe, according to ...

The mystery of galaxies in the early Universe just got even weirder. A team of astronomers has identified a giant spiral galaxy so well-formed that it already has a stable galactic bar; a long, ...

Astronomers have discovered the most distant barred spiral galaxy, similar to the Milky Way, that has been observed to date. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, an international team, including ...

An MIT astronomy class has found three of the oldest stars in the universe lurking right outside the Milky Way. The stars, about 30,000 light-years from Earth, are in the galaxy's "halo," the cloud of ...

Barred spiral galaxies, like the one pictured, were not expected to exist more than 7 billion years ago. Credit: NASA / ESO / JPL-Caltech / DSS Astronomers previously thought it took billions of years ...

Three of the oldest stars in our universe have been discovered, and they were lurking right under our noses this whole time, and traveling in the wrong direction The heavenly bodies were detected by ...

The Milky Way was once a textbook example of how a spiral galaxy should form and evolve. Now a wave of new observations and ...

The new study suggests that miniture solar systems would not necessarily look like our own. This composite of planets in our solar system was taken by various NASA spacecraft. Included in the image ...

To find the universe’s oldest stars, you must look for the ones with low chemical abundances and a retrograde orbit. That’s what a group of students in a class of MIT professor of physics and division ...