Space News & Blog Articles

Where exactly is the edge of the Milky Way? That question is harder to answer than one might expect. Since we’re inside of the galaxy itself, it’s obviously hard to judge the “edge” to begin with. But it gets even more complicated when defining what the edge even is - the galaxy simply gets less dense the farther away from the center it goes. A new paper by researchers originally at the University of Malta thinks they have an answer though. The “edge” can be defined as the star-forming region, and in their paper, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, they very clearly show that “edge” to be between 11.28 and 12.15 kiloparsecs (or about 40,000 light years) from the center.

The Sombrero Galaxy is so picture perfect it looks like a painting. It sits in space as if its hung on a gallery wall. It's an iconic deep space object, and a popular target for amateur and professional astronomers alike.

NASA and other space agencies spend a lot of time and money considering the cleanliness of their missions. Billions of dollars are spent in and on cleanrooms every year, with the express effort of ensuring both that the equipment operates without interference, but also that we don’t accidentally contaminate our exploration target with life from Earth itself. So far, we have primarily focused on bacteria in our efforts to stop this contamination, but according to a new paper by Atul M. Chander of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and his co-authors, we might be missing an entirely different threat - fungi.

Alpha Centauri is the nearest star system to our own, sitting just over four light years away and it’s fascinated astronomers and storytellers alike for generations. With conventional rockets, reaching it would take hundreds of thousands of years, even for the Orion spacecraft it would take around 100,000 years. But a team of researchers at Texas A&M University think they may have taken the first tentative step towards a technology that could get us there in just twenty years.

A few years ago, I attempted to make an origami (paper folded) animal. Armed with a square of paper and what I can only describe as misplaced confidence, I managed to produce something that looked vaguely threatening rather than like a flapping crane. If I struggled that much with a single sheet of paper on a kitchen table, I can’t begin to imagine what it takes to apply the same principle to a satellite antenna destined for space. But that is exactly what a team of engineers in Japan has just pulled off and the results are really quite extraordinary.

Space travel has taught us valuable lessons for living and working in outer space, specifically regarding how microgravity (often mistakenly called zero-gravity) impacts the human body during short- and long-term spaceflight. This includes decreased muscle and bone mass, fluid shifts, reduced heart rate, psychological health, compromised immune system, and radiation exposure. But with agencies like NASA aspiring to build a lunar base and establish a long-term presence on the Moon, and eventually Mars, how could space travel impact potentially having babies in space?

We don't know for sure how many dwarf galaxies are attached to the Milky Way because they're dim and hard to see. There's at least 50 of them, and astronomers keep finding more. Among the dwarf galaxies are the ultra-faint dwarf galaxies, the smallest and least bright of them all.