The Milky Way as a laboratory for civilizations Any attempt to chart alien societies has to start with the structure of The Milky Way itself, a disk roughly 100,000 light years across with hundreds of ...

Small, rocky planets can coalesce around a wide variety of stars, suggesting that Earth-like alien worlds may have formed early and often throughout our Milky Way galaxy's history, a new study reveals ...

Just three decades ago, astronomers had no evidence that planets commonly orbited other stars. Then in 2025, NASA confirmed ...

Scientists have uncovered the true boundary of the Milky Way’s star-forming region using stellar “age mapping.” They found a telltale U-shaped pattern showing that star formation drops sharply around ...

An unusual collection of stars may represent the remnants of a dwarf galaxy that the Milky Way devoured about 10 billion years ago. Astronomers have dubbed the ancient galaxy Loki, after the Norse god ...

Our Milky Way is far from calm — it ripples with a colossal wave spanning tens of thousands of light-years, revealed by ESA’s Gaia telescope. This wave, moving through the galaxy’s disc like ripples ...

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. A collision between ...

Though the Milky Way is generally always visible from Earth, certain times of year are better for stargazers to catch a glimpse of the band of billions of stars. "Milky Way season," when the galaxy's ...