My science professor gave a lecture one afternoon on cosmic topology, and one of the possibilities he presented was the universe being a 3D sphere, which would mean travelling in one direction would bring you back to your starting point eventually. We love your photos and welcome your news tips. Astronomers using the ALMA radio observatory have revealed an extremely distant galaxy that looks surprisingly like our Milky Way. We'll never see this galaxy reach the present-day, but we can be sure it'll look vastly different.
So maybe if we could see this galaxy as it is today, we may be gazing upon ourselves!I registered an account just to reply to this comment because I was so excited by someone else having this thought. What's interesting is that this structure is much bigger than anyone had realized. This link was super helpful for reading the actual paper We thought the world was flat, then found out it was curved. The galaxy, SPT0418-47, is gravitationally lensed by a nearby galaxy, appearing in the sky as a near-perfect ring of light. A cosmic magnifying glass has revealed a Milky Way-like galaxy in the early universe that doesn’t conform to cosmologists’ expectations.
Thus, to astronomers of previous centuries, there was no distinction between a hypothetical center of the galaxy and a hypothetical center of the universe. This band of stars can be seen with the naked eye in places with dark night skies.
The galaxies are moving away from each other. But the mention of our galaxy is misleading, especially if the authors predict that the small galaxy will eventually evolve into an eliptical galaxy---this is as un-Milky-Way-ish as you can get!Both SPT0418–47 and the Milky Way are rotating disks with central bulges. Current simulations solve that problem by including additional known processes, like the aforementioned gas-guzzling black hole and the blowback associated with newborn stars. 's Nature article is behind a paywall. The Milky Way has plenty of gas, and only moderate oomph of star formation, so it has not turned from a spiral galaxy into an elliptical...yet. It is 10 times smaller than ours! And when is thought to be 12 to 15 billion years after the Big Bang – believed to be the only moment in the history of the universe when all matter existed at the same place.The EarthSky team has a blast bringing you daily updates on your cosmos and world. They then reconstructed the galaxy, showing what it would look like to ALMA if there were no galactic lens distorting its shape. Such feedback would prevent the gas from making too many stars. Even Laniakea and Perseus-Pisces are just one small pocket of the much broader universe.
Sure, it has a rotating disk and even a small bulge. Early in the history of the universe, the Milky Way galaxy collided with a dwarf galaxy, left, which helped form our galaxy’s ring and structure as it’s known today. We thought space was flat then found out gravity can curve that.
(Credit: Bill Schoening, Vanessa Harvey/REU program/NOAO/AURA/NSF)A service of the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center ( It found that the universe is totally flat, thus precluding views of ourselves The reconstruction of a distant galaxy's shape and dynamics from its gravitational lense is very exciting - perhaps second only to the discovery of gravitational waves.Aren't black holes prohibited from having magnetic field by the no-hair theorem?True - but black holes can concentrate external magnetic fields in their accretion disk right up to the event horizon which then act as if they are intense magnetic fields being generated by the black hole as seen by the rest of the galaxy.
Our current picture of galaxy evolution says this galaxy will eventually run out of star-forming material, undergo some mergers with its neighbors, and end up as a massive elliptical with only old, red stars to show for the passage of cosmic time. Astronomers have thoroughly mapped the stars in this part of the Milky Way galaxy. Likewise, astronomers have plotted the Milky Way’s position with respect to the nearest galaxies – but the universe as a whole is a far bigger place than just our Local Group of galaxies. At the center of the observable universe, that is, the universe that we can see. It looks something like this: breaking down the team's findings. Well, it was first discovered in 1958 by radio telescopes that a nebula known as W51 is one of the most active star-making areas in our Milky Way galaxy. (Credit: E. L. Wright/UCLA, The COBE Project, DIRBE, There has been some debate over the years as to whether the Milky Way has two spiral arms or four. It makes sense now.If we have spectral analyses and determine that early galaxies could be similar to the Milky Way or M31, that would change everything. But there have been questions about how these stars are born and how their native place looks like. Ever since we started reading about the universe and the interstellar space, we have heard about stars. That’s how we know our sun’s location with respect to the galaxy’s center. (Credit: Credit: Urquhart JS, et al.
Milky Way's galactic center as center of the Universe Before the 1920s, it was generally believed that there were no galaxies other than our own (see for example The Great Debate ). Did ALMA detect a signal from the foreground lensing galaxy that has been removed through image processing, or is the foreground galaxy not visible at these wavelengths? The stills above come from that video.Elon Musk is one step closer to connecting a computer to your brainNeuralink has demonstrated a prototype of its brain-machine interface that currently works in pigs.Boseman’s family said the actor was diagnosed with stage three colon cancer in 2016.CNN fact-checked Trump’s RNC speech on air. It is very difficult to count the number of stars in the Milky Way from our position inside the galaxy.
This is the most detailed map yet of our place in the universe Astronomers generally avoid the problem of describing where the Milky Way is by saying when it is.