Milky Way

…Topics include the Milky Way and Andromeda, cosmic isolation as expansion continues, the fading microwave background, the end of star formation and the era of stellar remnants. They discuss uncertain processes such as proton decay, black-hole evaporation through Hawking radiation, entropy and heat death, alongside alternative outcomes if dark energy evolves. These are model-dependent projections. Pamela Gay is a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute. Published on 21 Septembe

Subha Majumdar presents a six-dimensional Milky Way phase-space catalogue designed to map stellar motions and dark matter beyond the reach of Gaia parallaxes alone. Gaia astrometry is combined with spectrophotometric distances and radial velocities from fourteen surveys, including DESI, SDSS-BOSS, APOGEE and LAMOST. The resulting catalogue contains about 33 million tracers and detailed distance–velocity measurements for roughly half a million halo stars. It characterizes distant clusters, dwarf galaxies and stellar streams, enabling mass modeling, kinematic studies, abundance mapping, Galactic

…It also considers what Milky Way clusters reveal about galaxy assembly and the distribution of ordinary and dark matter.

…formed stars much faster than the Milky Way today, and what eventually suppresses star formation.

…It places the Milky Way's central black hole in the broader population of galactic nuclei, then examines the first billion years of growth. Exceptionally rapid early development challenges current explanations and shapes later cosmic evolution.

The Milky Way's centre contains a supermassive black hole of roughly four million solar masses whose activity is comparatively weak. This seminar discusses its small radio jet and the infrared and X-ray flares that provide information about rotation in the surrounding accretion flow.