ESA’s decade-long Milky Way Gaia mapping mission still has tons of data to release over the next few years. Expect surprises.

Recent studies challenge the long-held belief that the Milky Way is a standard model for understanding galaxy formation, ...

Planets, asteroids and comets orbit more massive stars, and stars collect around supermassive black holes, forming galaxies.

Gaia was launched on December 19, 2013, and began scanning the stars in July 2014. It mapped over two billion stars, ...

The new composite image, which combines hundreds of photos from the Hubble Space Telescope, shows the Andromeda Galaxy with ...

In the meantime, there remains a chance to glimpse Gaia through a small telescope before its final retirement. Uwe Lammers, ...

Soon, the Gaia spacecraft will leave orbit and begin its retirement in the depths of space. In the last 10 years, it has ...

The one in the middle of the Milky Way, called Sagittarius A(asterisk ... Scientists know stars can form near and even orbit these black hole behemoths, but they've never seen a pair of stars ...

Known as Sgr A* – pronounced “Sagittarius A star” – the supermassive black hole is four million times the mass of the sun and is known to exhibit flares that can be observed in multiple wavelengths, ...

The European Space Agency's Milky Way-mapping space mission Gaia, which involves UCL researchers, has completed its ...

Astronomers have long tried to track down how elements like carbon, which is essential for life, become widely distributed across the universe. Now, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has examined one ...

Some 1.5 million kilometres away from Earth the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia spacecraft has been mapping out the Milky ...