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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...