Astronomers were able to exceed expectations and obtain a detailed three-dimensional map of the Milky Way’s magnetic fields. This was done using data collected by the Gaia spacecraft, which measures the position and speed of more than a billion stars in our galaxy. The Milky Way’s magnetic fields play a...
Previously, we imagined our galaxy as a flat disk. However, when studying the shape of the Milky Way in more detail, scientists discovered that the disk of our spiral galaxy is distorted. These features have long remained a mystery, but now astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard and...
One way to determine the mass of a galaxy is to study its rotation curve, measuring the speed of the stars in the galaxy depending on their distance from the galactic center. The speed at which a star rotates is proportional to the amount of mass in its orbit, so...