June 03, 2008 Milky Way's Inner Beauty Revealed We live in the Milky Way galaxy - a disk-shaped collection of about 400 billion stars including the Sun. Many of those stars and much of the dense gas between the stars concentrate into large arms that spiral outward from the galactic center.   Read More...

June 03, 2008 Milky Way Mapping Project Finds Surprisingly Slow Stars On Earth, making a map is as easy as taking aerial photographs or surveying a patch of land on foot. In contrast, mapping the Milky Way galaxy is a tremendous challenge.   Read More...

May 30, 2008 Famous Supernovae Still Echo Across the Milky Way While walking home on November 11, 1572, astronomer Tycho Brahe idly glanced at the sky. He was surprised to see a bright star in the constellation Cassiopeia that hadn't been there before.   Read More...