milky way

Lost galactic hitchhikers can now rejoice when they visit our corner of the Milky Way. A new sky map created by a NASA spacecraft shows the boundaries of our solar system in comparison to the rest of the interstellar neighborhood.

The boundaries are defined by our sun's heliosphere -- a protective bubble created by the solar wind that travels outward and collides with incoming interstellar radiation. That typically invisible boundary became visible through energetic neutral atoms created in the region that speed toward the sun at velocities ranging up to 2.4 million mph.

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The universe may be too big too big to wrap one’s mind around, but the European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere has succeeded in distilling the entire Milky Way Galaxy into one breathtaking cosmic image. ESO’s Gigagalaxy Zoom project has released a stunning 360-degree panorama of the cosmos surrounding earth as seen with the unaided eye from one of the darkest places on earth.

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Yes, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that man is at the root of most of Earth's warming in the last five decades. Still, some researchers say the trend can be attributed to natural causes, including changes in the flux of cosmic rays slamming into our atmosphere, but now, according to Physics World, a pair of U.K. particle physicists have dismissed that idea.

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