The Milky Way is the barred spiral galaxy containing the Solar System, home to hundreds of billions of stars and built up through mergers with smaller galaxies.
Megatron simulations suggest the region that became a Milky Way-like galaxy held thousands of small merging galaxies in the universe's first 2 billion years. Its galaxies come with predicted spectra that can be checked directly against James Webb Space Telescope data.
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UCL astronomers modeling lopsided supernova debris find that four peculiar stars once attributed to hypernovae are better explained without them. The verdict is a statistical preference across four stars, and it depends on how poorly supernova debris mixes, a question the authors say is still open.
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Researchers using the EAGLE universe simulations report in MNRAS that the Sun's place in the Milky Way's outskirts is about as good for life as locations get. The ranking rests on modeled hazards and assumed chemistry, so it says where conditions favor life and leaves open whether any life is there.
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Researchers who let supernova debris spread unevenly matched the element ratios of odd Milky Way halo stars as well as or better than a hypernova model did. That undercuts the chemical case for hypernovas, though MIT's Anna Frebel says they remain plausible.
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Hubble imaging and Gaia orbits separate a third population of ancient star clusters in the galaxy's inner regions, evidence of a dwarf galaxy swallowed about 11.8 billion years ago.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
A University of Washington team ran roughly 15,000 streams through four clump-free Milky Way analogues for five billion years and got the gaps and kinks usually read as subhalo signals. The host galaxy is now a control.
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Aquarius IV is one of the faintest Milky Way satellites ever recorded, pulled out of Vera C. Rubin Observatory test data taken before the main survey began. The research note has not been peer reviewed.
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