The Milky Way Galaxy is the home galaxy of our solar system. It is a large spiral galaxy containing an aggregation of gas, dust, an estimated 400 billion stars, and thousands of globular clusters and nebulae. The Galaxy's mass is probably between 750...

If you go out into the countryside on a clear summer night, far from city lights and look up, you will see a band of light arching across the vault of the sky. In Ancient Greek and Roman legend, this was a milky river that flowed across the sky. They...

The Milky Way (a translation of the Latin Via Lactea, in turn derived from the Greek Γαλαξίας (Galaxias) sometimes referred to simply as "the Galaxy"), is a barred spiral galaxy that is part of the Local Group of galaxies. Although the Milky Way...

The heavens are only a few mouse clicks away with Google Inc.'s latest free tool. A new feature in Google Earth, the company's satellite imagery-based mapping software, allows users to view the sky from their computers.The tool provides information about various celestial bodies, from stars...

The maker of M&M's and Milky Way bars says it would be a mistake to mess with its chocolate.Mars Inc. said Monday it will continue to use 100 percent cocoa butter in its U.S. chocolate products, bucking an industry campaign to allow cheaper vegetable oils...

Having coaxed all the life they can out of an 8-year-old ultraviolet light-detecting space telescope, scientists will reluctantly turn it off later this month.After that, NASA's Fuse observatory will be "just another piece of space junk," orbiting the earth every 100 minutes until it falls...

Young galaxies, so faint that scientists struggled to prove they were there at all, have been discovered by aiming two of the world's most powerful telescopes at a single patch of sky for nearly 100 hours.An international group of researchers has identified 27 pre-galactic fragments,...