CURRENT AFFAIRS

Detailed explanation-1: -University of Birmingham researchers have detected the acoustic oscillations of Milky Way stars that are about 13 billion years old, or not much younger than the galaxy itself.

Detailed explanation-2: -Astronomers have unveiled the first image of the supermassive black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy. This result provides overwhelming evidence that the object is indeed a black hole and yields valuable clues about the workings of such giants, which are thought to reside at the centre of most galaxies.

Detailed explanation-3: -The concentration of stars in a band adds to the evidence that the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy. If we lived in an elliptical galaxy, we would see the stars of our galaxy spread out all around the sky, not in a single band.

Detailed explanation-4: -A galaxy is a huge bunch of stars clustered together in space. Our solar system-which includes the sun, Earth, and seven other planets-is part of this galaxy, called … you guessed it … the Milky Way. The Milky Way contains hundreds of billions of stars like our sun.

Detailed explanation-5: -Our Milky Way galaxy is just one of the billions of galaxies in the universe. Within it, there are at least 100 billion stars, and on average, each star has at least one planet orbiting it. This means there are potentially thousands of planetary systems like our solar system within the galaxy!