Tag: Milky Way
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The gravitational waltz of the Milky Way’s satellites
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] I’ve started contributing to the Forbes Science page again! This is my first new contribution, relating to the second data release from the Gaia survey telescope. (And if I…
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Seeing the invisible monster at the Milky Way center
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] This is my second print magazine feature for Smithsonian Air & Space Magazine. The first was about gravitational waves, published not long before the LIGO detector found the first gravitational…
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The dinosaur-killing dark matter of DOOM!
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] A few weeks ago, several news outlets ran stories based on a press release, in which a researcher claimed that dense clumps of dark matter could be responsible for…
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The week in review (August 25-31)
Welcome to the weekly round-up of stories I wrote this week, wherever they hide. A tour of physics, Angry Birds style (Double X Science): The odds are good that you’ve played Angry Birds, even if (like me) you don’t own a device that will run the game. My colleague Rhett Allain wrote a book for…
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Why do half of Andromeda’s satellite galaxies orbit in a plane?
Our local group of galaxies—known imaginatively as the Local Group—has two huge galaxies: the Milky Way and M31, also known as the Andromeda Galaxy. Both of these galaxies are large enough to have a number of satellites, including the substantial Magellanic Clouds and M33 (Triangulum Galaxy). However, most satellites are dwarf galaxies, very faint and…
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The darkness at the center of the galaxy
Since 1995, a team of astronomers led by Andrea Ghez has been studying the motion of stars near the center of the Milky Way. They just announced the discovery that one of those stars is the closest to the black hole yet, with an orbital period of about 11.5 years—short enough that they’ve been able…
Bowler Hat Science 