A giant cloud of hydrogen gas is speeding toward a collision with our Milky Way Galaxy, and when it hits — in less than 40 million years — it may set off a spectacular burst of stellar fireworks.

A composite radio-optical image shows five new clouds of hydrogen gas discovered using the National Science Foundation’s Green Bank Telescope.

Astronomers have produced a scientific gold mine of detailed, high-quality images of nearby galaxies that is yielding important new insights into many aspects of galaxies, including their complex structures, how they form stars, the motions of gas in the galaxies, the relationship of normal matter to unseen dark matter, and many others.

Having the sharpest pictures always is a big advantage, and a sophisticated radio-astronomy technique using continent-wide and even intercontinental arrays of telescopes is yielding extremely valuable scientific results in a wide range of specialties. That’s the message delivered to the American Astronomical Society’s meeting in Austin, Texas, by Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a leading researcher in the field of ultra-precise astronomical position measurements.

A new series of short radio programs designed to bring the space-age science of radio astronomy down to Earth is being launched by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and Allegheny Mountain Radio.

Astronomers have known for decades that supermassive black holes at the cores of galaxies can shoot out jets of subatomic particles at tremendous speeds.