It is located in the Milky Way galaxy, about 335 light years from Earth.
It also can help predict how Earth's neighborhood, the Milky Way galaxy, formed and how it might evolve.
At a relatively close distance of 2.5 million light-years, Andromeda is very similar in size to our own Milky Way Galaxy.
They were then despatched towards deep space, in the general direction of the centre of our Milky Way Galaxy.
Try as they might astronomers simply cannot see through these clouds to the centre of our Milky Way galaxy.
And there are probably many alien Earths out there to be found in our Milky Way galaxy, researchers say.
That means our Milky Way galaxy hosts at least 17 billion Earth-sized planets.
When she was a child a century ago, the known universe extended only to the edge of the Milky Way galaxy.
Kepler data have yielded an estimate of the total number of Earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy: at least 17 billion.
More than a billion stars blaze bright in a new photo of our Milky Way galaxy snapped by an international team of astronomers.
And that may be one crucial difference that separates ours from millions of other sun-like stars in this part of our Milky Way galaxy.
But could there be intelligent life in another planetary system, in orbit around one of the 100 billion other stars in our Milky Way galaxy?
Our sun does not orbit another star, but roughly half of the stars in our Milky Way galaxy do, as part of a binary system.
MSN: 'Impossible' stars found in our galaxy - Technology & science - Space - Space.com | NBC News
The Wall Street Journal reported last Thursday that astronomers are now confident that every star in the Milky Way galaxy is sun to at least one planet.
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Four pairs of what astronomers are calling "impossible stars" stellar twins in orbits so close they defy explanation have been found in our Milky Way galaxy, scientists say.
MSN: 'Impossible' stars found in our galaxy - Technology & science - Space - Space.com | NBC News
Over a five-year period, the satellite's e2v array, allied to two telescopes and some sophisticated instrumentation that includes an atomic clock, will make an unprecedented 3D map of our Milky Way Galaxy.
While red dwarfs are the most common type of star in the Milky Way galaxy, they often do not show up in astronomical surveys because they are too dim in visible light.
MSN: 'Impossible' stars found in our galaxy - Technology & science - Space - Space.com | NBC News
The simulation detailed in the new paper is based on a sphere centered on our sun that stretches through the disk of our Milky Way galaxy out to a distance of almost a 1000 light years.
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Despite the fact that it is probable that a black hole lurks at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy, astronomers still know very little about these celestial monsters which vacuum up almost everything in their path, even light.
The beetles performed best when confronted with a perfect starry sky projected on to the planetarium dome, but coped just as well when shown only the diffuse bar of light that is the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy.
Exploded stars may account for most of the cosmic rays that are produced in our Milky Way Galaxy, but there is another class of cosmic rays at even higher energies and these are thought to have their origins further afield.
Finally, it all launched into outer space with a question about whether the prime minister had looked at the milky way galaxy lately and, if so, what was he going to do to stop light pollution which is destroying that experience.
He got his own back on Ryle, for instance, by claiming in 1951 that some of the signals being detected by the radio telescopes that astronomers were then constructing came from outside the Milky Way galaxy in which the Earth resides.
Science editor Alan Boyle's blog: A simulation based on data from NASA's planet-hunting Kepler mission has determined that about one out of every six stars has an Earth-sized planet, which would translate to at least 17 billion such worlds in our Milky Way galaxy.
If bursts occur within the Milky Way, the galaxy that contains the earth's solar system, they could be relatively small affairs quakes on the surfaces of neutron stars is one suggestion.
Most spiral galaxies, including our home galaxy the Milky Way, have a large concentration of ancient stars surrounding the centre that astronomers call the bulge.
ENGADGET: 9-gigapixel image of the Milky Way reminds us just how small we truly are
Such disturbance has traditionally been ascribed to the combined gravitational effect of all the stars of the earth's home galaxy, the Milky Way.
Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, has a colossal black hole at its core, too, which is some three million times the mass of our Sun.
BBC: NEWS | Science/Nature | Deepest X-rays tell merger story
For the past few years Dr Kuhlen and his colleagues have been working on a computer model of the halo of dark matter in which the Milky Way (the Earth's home galaxy) is thought to be embedded.
ECONOMIST: The search for dark matter: Ethereal yet weighty | The
Understanding the formation and evolution of the Milky Way's bulge is vital for understanding the galaxy as a whole.
ENGADGET: 9-gigapixel image of the Milky Way reminds us just how small we truly are
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