Imagine the disc of our galaxy, if you just took a disc of stars and put it there, gravity would tend to make this disc collapse/ into itself and it would immediately just fall together. That is not what we see with the galaxy. Whats actually going o...
They were once thought to mark the outer limits, but today astronomers believe the Milky Way galaxy is much bigger than what we can see. To understand why, we will travel to the stars of the outer galactic disc. Far from our usual place in space, we...
One of the puzzles about our galaxy is that we know that it's had stars forming continuously for about the last ten billion years. But at the rate/ it's eating up its gas now, it's forming new stars, it should burn out that gas soon, should run out o...
Measuring the brightnesses and colors of the stars in the globular cluster, we can figure out how old they are. Here is the remarkable thing: they are very old. Globular clusters, at least the stars in the globular clusters, in many cases, are almost...
We are traveling upwards away from our solar system, out of the spiral arms of the Milky Way. In front of us, lie vast clusters of stars, satellite groups that orbit the heart of our galaxy. These are globular clusters, over 150 have been discovered....
The glowing region is the accretion disc, star debris falling inward, would turn round in the maelstrom heated by frictions to such high temperatures that it glows white hot. So at the center of our galaxy, we do have a black hole. We now know that t...
Each tag is whipping around the center of the galaxy, the particular, the most striking thing you will notice is the motion of SO2.So SO2 goes on an incredible roller-coaster ride. It comes whipping around and then back out. Something with tremendous...
Its a stunning location, but its also mysterious. These stars are not just close together. They are on the move at enormous speeds. Going to the heart of a galaxy might not be the similar to going to an amusement park. The rides are some similar to h...
In about four or five billion years, it will grow into a much bigger star, a star called a red giant. And that outer atmosphere of gases will be held so loosely by the sun at that time that the gases will be blown away gently in what I call a cosmic...
We are at a foundry here, and they are pouring molten iron from all machinery. And they are going to make parts for new machines out of that iron, so they are recycling yet, but all that iron was created and ejected into the cosmos by gigantic stars...
Once theyve caught the light of a dying star with their state of our telescopes. The detective work can begin. We collect that light and we analyze it in great detail in order to determine whats going on, whats the chemical makeup of the star, whats...
To understand how these calamities occur, astronomers need to catch a massive star in its death throes. Astronomers are like detectives. We have to figure out what's going on in the universe, sometimes based on a minimum number of clues. And in the c...
Like nebulae which spawn stars, it is made of gas and dust. But that's where most similarities end. For Alex Filippenko, it represents an intriguing industrial zone within our galaxy where the elements from which our world is made or manufactured. Wh...
Like nebulae which spawn stars, it is made of gas and dust. But that's where most similarities end. For Alex Filippenko, it represents an intriguing industrial zone within our galaxy where the elements from which our world is made or manufactured. Wh...
This is a picture of the Orion Nebula in visible light. We can see all of the gas here located in front of what we know are stars in the background, and we want to be able to look inside this nebula/ and see the stars. In infrared light in this image...
