The central question of this Letter is how and when the Milky Way assembled its stellar mass. This issue is addressed by tracing the formation history of spiral galaxies which closely resemble the Milky Way.
Unlike its candy bar namesake, the center of our Milky Way Galaxy is not actually a very pleasant place to be. There’s a supermassive central black hole to deal with, intense radiation from a population of massive stars, and hot clouds of molecular gas. In this paper, the authors use observations of three molecular spectral lines to measure the temperatures of these gas clouds in the center of the Galaxy, and find that the processes heating the clouds may not be what you expect!
Carretti and collaborators have found new evidence that the gigantic bubbles of emission emanating from the center of our Milky Way are the result of winds from supernova explosions, not jets from our supermassive black hole.
Everything in our galaxy is moving– you, the earth underneath you, the sun, other stars– everything. However, it turns out that figuring out how fast some of these things are moving is surprisingly difficult, and can have Galactic-sized implications!
Pairs of dwarf galaxies in the Local Group are much more common than what expected from N-body/semi-analytic models of galaxy formation.
Recent studies have revealed a surprising amount of activity happening in the heart of our own Milky Way. In this paper, Liu et al. explore the kinematics of the gas outside the most central regions of our galaxy, and reveal that the Galactic center is being fed even more material from the main structure of the Milky Way.