A particular focus of much head scratching is the bar that appears in many spiral galaxies. How does this form and why only in some spiral galaxies? One thing that astronomers have studied in ...

The Milky Way is a "barred spiral" galaxy; its central bar stretches some 27,000 light years in length (Illustration: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R Hurt/SSC) Small spiral galaxies with bars at their centres ...

When the universe was just two billion years old, the newfound spiral galaxy, ceers-2112, appears to have featured a bar of stars and gas cutting across its heart, like a slash across a no-smoking ...

Central bars occur in about two-thirds of spiral galaxies. We think they are regions of many overlapping stellar orbits. Bars are also density waves that rotate around the disk with a speed ...

The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy comprised of a bar-shaped core region surrounded ... sun and a large sample of stars to help construct a 3D map of the galaxy. They focused on a specific kind ...

In some spiral galaxies, the stars move in elongated orbits near the centre so that, from far, this portion appears like an illuminated bar. Nearly two-thirds of the disc galaxies in the local ...

About two thirds of spiral galaxies observed in the universe today possess a bar structure. The bar is thought to serve as a form of stellar nursery, bringing gas inward from the galaxy's spiral arms.