The Milky Way galaxy, our home collection of hundreds of billions of stars (with perhaps hundreds of billions of other worlds), will be visible nearly directly overhead, stretching from north to south, at about nine pm on Valentine's night. This is a beautiful object to view in binoculars or with just your eyes, and new discoveries have shown that it is even more remarkable than we once thought.
Despite the fact that the Milky Way consists of a few hundred billion stars, this is a fairly dim band of light across the night sky. So, it is best to get into the darkest area you can for viewing, far away from city lights. Look for it stretching across the sky over New Hampshire from just a little bit west of due south at nine o'clock Tuesday night, trailing overhead, to just a little bit east of north.
There have been several new discoveries about our galaxy in the last few weeks; Our galaxy now appears to have a few hundred small, dim companion mini-galaxies surrounding it, and not just the few dozen once known. This lends credence to the idea that our galaxy coagulated slowly from a single huge cloud of gas and dust.
Also, NASA just announced this week that the Planck mission (a space telescope that detects microwave radiation) has just uncovered both a mysterious haze around the center of our galaxy, as well as carbon monoxide gas where it has never been spotted before.
The haze at the center of the galaxy appears to be similar to readings from other parts of the galaxy where photons of light accelerate through a magnetic field, but these are more energetic, for unknown reasons. It could be the annihilation of the even-more-mysterious “dark matter” that makes up most of the physical “stuff” of the Universe.
Ironically, the discovery was made in an effort to eliminate any microwave energy sources from what the Planck mission is really looking to map – the microwave radiation that permeates our Universe as the “echo” of the Big Bang.
Each large galaxy is believed to have a super-massive black hole at its center. Observations of x-ray flares seen coming from the center of the Milky Way suggests that the black hole at the center of the Milky Way swallows an asteroid the size of Mount Everest every day.
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