Hypervelocity stars race across the Milky Way at speeds greater than 1,000,000 miles per hour! Listen to learn how astronomers hope to use these speedy stars to measure the distribution of dark matter in the Milky Way!
WHAM
On this week’s episode of Radio Astronomy, Zach Pace and Dr. Matt Haffner discuss the Wisconsin H-Alpha Mapper, or WHAM. This telescope has mapped the warm, ionized gas in our Milky Way Galaxy over the entire sky. Learn more here: http://www.syfy.com/syfywire/sky-filled-warm-fuzzy-gas
Stuff Matters: Inter-Galactic Mass Transfer
As we broadcast, the Voyager 1 spacecraft, launched from earth in 1977, is approximately 10.8 billion miles away and has only just left the outer influence of the solar system. Meanwhile, the Large Magellanic Cloud, the closest large galaxy to our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is a mind-boggling 89 million times further away — […]
The Milky Way’s Odd Satetellites
Diego Casanova and Jacqueline Goldstein discuss a recent survey indicating that the satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way may not resemble those orbiting other Milky Way like galaxies. Yale University. “Is the Milky Way an ‘outlier’ galaxy? Studying its ‘siblings’ for clues.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 20 September 2017.