In order to understand the galactic neighborhood that can be identified by nacked eye we will we will say today a few words about the Aquila Rift. With some of the blog entries I have already made you might be in a good possition to understand this picture:



In this blog I have already written about the motion of the solar system, about the spiral arms that you can see by nacked...

The McKee-Ostriker model describes the interstellar medium with most of its mass concentrated in clouds with a small filling factor (a measure of the homogeneous distribution of a component in space), whereas much of its volume is filled with warm inter-cloud gas that surrounds the clouds. A hot gas component exists as well, which is generated by supernova explosions and strong winds from massive stars. This tenuous gas has a low density. Cool, dense clouds with high density are immersed in this...

Is there a relation between the physics of the interstellar medium (ISM) and the earth's atmosphere that may have had an impact on life in past? I will shortly summarize some tantalizing ideas about this and provide you some references. The summary is by far not complete and I should only mention some aspects of this topic. Currently there is no strong experimental evidence of that ideas so remember that we will be in the realm of speculation.

The sun is located in a low density...

Recently, a survey of stars by the Spitzer Space Telescope of the NASA gave hints that the Milky Way might be a barred spiral galaxy, instead of a spiral galaxy as previously thought.

Galaxy classification and the Milky Way

There are several classifications of galaxies depending on different criteria used to make the classification.

In the Hubble system the Milky Way is a SBbc galaxy, meaning that it is a spiral galaxy (S), containing a bar (B) and...

You will find here a short introduction to the Planck mission, one of the most exciting cosmological probes in the next three or four years. This introduction does not pretend to be a complete description, since I will mention only some aspects that seam to be especially of interest from my point of view. You can find more information in the pages I link below.

The Planck mission

The satellite Planck of the ESA will provide a map of the Cosmic Microwave Background...