Now We Know How Fast We're Traveling Through Space

Ask a scientist for our cosmic address, and you'll get quite a mouthful. Here we are, on planet Earth, which spins on its axis and revolves around the Sun, which orbits in an ellipse around the center of the Milky Way, which is being pulled towards Andromeda within our

By Ethan Siegel www.forbes.com 6-16-17

local group, which is being pushed around inside our cosmic supercluster, Laniakea, by galactic groups, clusters, and cosmic voids, which itself lies in the KBC void amidst the large-scale structure of the Universe. After decades of research, science has finally put together the complete picture, and can quantify exactly how fast we're moving through space, on every scale.

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Most Detailed 3D Atlas of a Billion Stars Released by ESA | VIDEO

• Satellite is now just over half-way through its five-year mission and the first batch of data has been released • The one billion stars it has located are still only one per cent of the Milky Way's estimated stellar population

Abigail Beall Mailonline 9-14-16

• Gaia's mapping effort is already unprecedented in scale, but the satellite still has several years left to run

• In the future Gaia will collect data about each star's temperature, luminosity and chemical composition

Esa has unveiled a stunning 3D map of a billion stars in our galaxy that is 1,000 times more complete than anything that previously existed.

The data for the map was collected by a space-based probe called Gaia, which has been circling the sun nearly a million miles beyond Earth's orbit since its launch in December 2013.

On its journey, the satellite has been discreetly snapping pictures of the Milky Way.

Now the European Space Agency has released the first batch of data collected by Gaia, which includes information on the brightness and position of over a billion stars. ...

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Mystery Object Near Milky Way's Monster Black Hole

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A computer simulation shows the G2 gas cloud's encounter with the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* at the center of the Milky Way, as well as the paths of the many other objects that orbit the black hole.

By Calla Cofield
Space.com
12-30-14

      A mystery object at the center of the galaxy has astronomers scratching their heads, and a new piece of information won't be solving the case before the New Year.

In yet another twist to a saga of astronomical proportions, astronomers have identified what they say is a gas cloud that made a tight orbit around the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy 13 years ago. The object could be one in a series of gas clouds, the second of which may soon become a snack for the black hole.

The newly discovered object has been dubbed G1. An object known as G2 has been in the news for more than a year, ever since astronomers at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany hypothesized that it was a gas cloud. If that is true, it should lose some of its material to the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way (known as Sagittarius A* or Sgr A*). This giant black hole — its name is pronounced Sagittarius A(star) — doesn't dine on material often, so the event would be a rare chance for astronomers to watch a black hole eat. . . .

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NEW TECHNOLOGY: Gaia Space Telescope To Measure a Billion Stars of our Milky Way Galaxy | VIDEO

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By European Space Agency (ESA)
11-6-13

      Our Galaxy the Milky Way is made up of a hundred billion stars. To truly understand its evolution we need to know exactly where we stand in this mass of constantly moving and changing celestial objects. To do this, astrometry, the science of measuring the position, distance and movement of stars around us, is just about to take a giant leap forward with the launch of ESA's new space telescope, Gaia. Gaia will make it possible to measure a billion stars of our Milky Way. . . .

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Alien Probes Could Be Surfing the Galaxy

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By Ray Villard
news.discovery.com
7-14-13

      Computer simulations by a pair of researchers at the University of Edinburgh predict that a fleet of interstellar probes could explore the entire Milky Way galaxy within a fraction of the present age of Earth. This may seem like a tall order considering that our farthest interstellar spacecraft, Voyager 1, is still less than a light-day from Earth after being launched 36 years ago.

In the new simulation, however, alien probes only need to travel at 10 percent the speed of light to survey the entire galaxy within 10 million years. And, they could get a turbo-boost and save fuel by doing a slingshot off the gravitational fields of stars.

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The concept of self-aware and self-replicating probes traveling across the galaxy is nothing new, however; the idea goes as far back as 1960. It was promoted by SETI pioneer Ronald Bracewell as an alternative to listening for interstellar artificial radio signals. The idea of a machine capable of cloning itself goes back at least 100 years; mathematician John von Neumann detailed the operation of such a robot in 1949. . . .

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60 Billion Alien Planets Could Support Life, Study Suggests

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By Megan Gannon
www.space.com
7-1-13

      Though only about dozen potentially habitable exoplanets have been detected so far, scientists say the universe should be teeming with alien worlds that could support life. The Milky Way alone may host 60 billion such planets around faint red dwarf stars, a new estimate suggests.

Based on data from NASA's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft, scientists have predicted that there should be one Earth-size planet in the habitable zone of each red dwarf, the most common type of star. But a group of researchers has now doubled that estimate after considering how cloud cover might help an alien planet support life.

"Clouds cause warming, and they cause cooling on Earth," study researcher Dorian Abbot, an assistant professor in geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago, said in a statement. "They reflect sunlight to cool things off, and they absorb infrared radiation from the surface to make a greenhouse effect. That's part of what keeps the planet warm enough to sustain life."

The habitable zone is defined as the region where a planet has the right temperature to keep liquid water on its surface, thought to be a requirement for life as we know it. If a planet is too far from its star, its water freezes; too close, water vaporizes. Since red dwarfs are dimmer and cooler than our sun, their habitable zone is much cozier than our solar system's. . . .

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Galaxy 'Crash Scene' Is One Of Universe's Biggest Structures, Astrophysicist Says | SPACE NEWS

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By Charles Q. Choi
SPACE.com via The Huffington Post
2-1-13

      A glowing cosmic structure millions of light-years long represents the aftermath of the impact of two merging galaxy clusters, researchers say.

"This is one of the biggest structures ever observed," study lead author Ettore Carretti told SPACE.com. "It is more than 100 times the size of our galaxy, the Milky Way, which already stretches for 100,000 light-years."

Carretti, an astrophysicist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Australia, and his colleagues used the Parkes Radio Telescope in New South Wales to analyze a cluster of galaxies known as Abell 3667. The cluster lies about 730 million light-years from Earth. (A light-year is the distance light travels in one year, about 5.9 trillion miles, or 9.5 trillion kilometers.)

"Clusters of galaxies are made of thousands of galaxies and are among the largest gravitationally bound structures," Carretti noted.

The researchers detected a diffuse radio glow in the gas and dust connecting the cluster's periphery to its core. The structure is about 13 million light-years long. [Biggest Structure in the Universe Explained (Infographic)]

Carretti said: "This is the first clear imaging of a huge impact between two merging clusters of galaxies. The overall structure we observe, part of which was already known, is a monster shock wave and its trailing wake caused by the cluster impact. The wake is the leftover after the passage of the shock, which leaves behind a turbulent 'shaken' medium." . . .

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Twins! Another Black Hole Found in One Galaxy

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By Tariq Malik
www.msnbc.msn.com
6-13-11

     A galaxy already known to have one ginormous black hole at its core is actually home to two of these cosmic giants, a new study reveals.

Astronomers discovered the second monster black hole at the center of the galaxy Markarian 739, which is about 425 million light-years from Earth, toward the constellation Leo. Its presence was revealed in observations by NASA's Swift satellite and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.

The two black holes are separated by about 11,000 light-years, which is about one-third the distance between our solar system and the center of the Milky Way. One light-year is about 6 trillion miles.

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