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Ever wonder if we’ll find intelligent life in our galazy, with whom we could one day communicate with? With approximately 100 billion stars in our Milky Way, it certainly seems plausible that such a species or civilization might exist. The Drake Equation, developed by Frank Drake in 1961, is a tool to estimate these odds. […]

“Telescopes are in some ways like time machines. They reveal galaxies so far away that their light has taken billions of years to reach us. We in astronomy have an advantage in studying the universe, in that we can actually see the past. We owe our existence to stars, because they make the atoms of […]

A galaxy is a collection of stars, gas, and dust bound together by gravity.  The smallest galaxies may contain only a few hundred thousand stars, while the largest may have hundreds of billions.  Galaxies are spread about by vast distances, separated by (relatively) empty space.  Their diameters may range from hundreds of light years across […]