These include capturing the first image of an exoplanet and contributing to Nobel Prize-winning research on the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. The observatory's telescopes ...

In 1920, astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis held a Great Debate. Shapley argued that the spiral nebulae were small and in the Milky Way, while Curtis took a more radical position that they ...

In the 1920s, astronomers thought that the Milky Way was the entire universe. Hubble's discovery revealed a much bigger ...

The Milky Way keeps its planets close to its chest. Stars in a thin, flat disk bisecting the galaxy have more planets on average than stars in a thicker, enveloping disk — and astronomers now ...

"Beyond the Milky Way lie billions of other galaxies ... more likely to be the gas and dust that supplies the raw material for new stars and planets. New ways of finding distances to the nebulae ...

Astronomers have discovered an extraordinary new giant radio galaxy with plasma jets 32 times the size of our Milky Way. Measuring 3.3 million light-years from end-to-end, the cosmic megastructure ...

100 years ago, Hubble revealed a universe of galaxies that existed beyond ours — but he couldn't have done it without a little help. If we could go back 101 years, we would encounter a time when ...

The mission, which has been mapping the Milky Way for the last 12 years, shut down science operations on Wednesday (Jan. 15). The close of the mission's data-collecting phase was necessitated by ...

This illustration shows a stage in the predicted merger between our Milky Way galaxy and the ... [+] neighboring Andromeda galaxy, as it will unfold over the next several billion years.

Jamie Carter is an award-winning reporter who covers the night sky. Summer is the best time of year for seeing the Milky Way from the northern hemisphere—and parts of August are the very best.