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At the center of our Milky Way galaxy is a supermassive black hole.

A black hole lenses the light of the Milky Way in the background (Credit: Ute Kraus amd Axel Mellinger) This weekend Stephen Hawking turns 70, an extraordinary physical accomplishment to add to an extraordinary list of physics accomplishments. Seeing this news reminded me of the the first time that I crossed paths with Hawking.

Our Milky Way is just one of many billions of galaxies that dot the cosmos--an ordinary spiral in a universe filled with them. The unspecialness of our corner of space, an idea known as the Copernican principle, is a cornerstone of modern cosmology.

(PhysOrg.com) -- The primary objective of NASA’s Kepler satellite, which was launched in March 2009 to orbit the Sun, is to search for Earth-like planets in a portion of the Milky Way galaxy. But now a team of physicists has proposed that Kepler could have a second appealing purpose: to either detect or rule out primordial black holes (PBHs) of a certain mass range as the primary constituent of dark matter.

Although astronomers only slowly came to realize dark matter’s importance in the universe, for me personally it happened in an instant. In my first project as a postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1978, I measured the rotational velocities of star-forming giant molecular clouds in the outer part of the disk of our Milky Way galaxy.

The lovely, familiar swirl of the Milky Way, with its symmetric spiral arms winding outward from a central bulge, may be scars from a smaller galaxy punching above its weight.

Fantastically detailed, visually arresting photographs of Andromeda, a spiral galaxy that lies 2.5 million light-years from Earth, have been available for years.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Roughly 10 billion miles beyond Neptune's orbit, and well past their 30th birthdays, Voyagers 1 and 2 continue their lonely trek into the Milky Way.

A simulation of galactic growth shows how a galaxy akin to our own Milky Way might have appeared 10 billion years ago.

Dark matter. Nobody knows what it is, but it's thought to make up a quarter of the universe

Photograph by Chris Floyd FORGET BLUE skies -- for a growing community of stargazing tourists, darkness is all they want. "People have never seen the Milky Way," says Rowena Davis of the International Dark-Sky Association, which identifies the earth's best locales for appreciating the heavens