if you've heard only one piece of space news this year it's probably that the James Webb Space Telescope is hard at work delivering science and breathtaking views of the universe it's going to usher in a whole new era of astronomy but Webb is far from the only space news that happened this year and we'd like to highlight three stories you may have missed we're going to start a bit zoomed out far enough to get a view of the whole Milky Way back in August.

scientists revealed the first map of what they call the galactic underworld a Galaxy sized graveyard populated by neutron stars and black holes the remnants of supernova explosions yeah the news did come out a bit too early for spooky season supernovas tend to happen in the regions of the Milky Way known as The Bold and the disc because that's where most stars form and you need stars to make supernovas but Stars don't explode in perfect spheres any kind of matter or pressure imbalance will shoot the remnant off into the unknown like a rocket until now.

scientists hadn't tracked where those neutron star and black hole Rockets ended up but one group of research researchers took on the challenge to construct their map they simulated the lives of over 400 000 stars and tracked them post-supernova to see where they ended up and the resulting graveyard didn't look quite like what they expected the Milky Way's distribution of dead stars doesn't match its distribution of live stars in fact the graveyard doesn't even have spiral arms but that's probably because these remnants are rocketing off in mostly random directions which erases a lot of the spiral structure also many of these remnants were created.

when the Milky Way was billions of years younger galaxies evolved so the Milky Way didn't have the same distribution of stars as it does today the map also revealed how much bigger the graveyard is than the galactic bulge and disc if you look at the Galaxy Edge on most of the remnants are spread across a band that's three times taller than where living stars are found but here's the spookiest Revelation roughly one third of the remnants turned into ghosts they vanished from the map entirely the team believes that a supernova's position in the Galaxy as well as subtle variations in the explosion itself dictate whether or not a Remnant will be completely in ejected from the Milky Way now.

even though it's based on real astronomical data this map is constructed from a simulation it'll take way more powerful telescopes than we currently have to create the first true map of the galactic underworld so we can't take a tour quite yet but this research is a solid step forward in the quest to understand our Galactic home if we zoom in on the center of our galaxy we'll see the subject of our Second Story back in May astronomers released an image of the Milky Way's supermassive black hole known as Sagittarius A star.

well, it's an image of the Shadow around the black hole because that's the closest physics will ever let us get Sagittarius A star is now the second black hole shadow that scientists have been able to resolve the first belong to the black hole at the center of Galaxy m87 you may even remember when its image was released back into the public in 2019 we certainly covered it the data for both images were collected in 2017. so why did it take so much longer for scientists to release the one for our black hole it's millions of light years closer but it's also 1500 times less massive and less massive means the disc of matter surrounding the black hole.

orbits much faster making the image come out much more blurry so scientists had to invent entirely new computer models and algorithms to compensate and all that hard work paid off in addition to the image of a pretty orange donut The Event Horizon telescope collaboration published 10 scientific papers on black holes and imaging technology some of the research confirmed what scientists thought we knew like how big black hole Shadows should be and some revealed our models of the environment around a black hole are incomplete so the investigations continue not just of Sagittarius A star but black holes throughout the Universe astronomers also use new computer models for our final story zooming into our own planetary system.

a paper published in October proposes that the Moon may have formed in just a few hours if that sounds ridiculously fast to you you're not alone previous estimates suggest it took months if not decades the most widely accepted hypothesis for how the moon formed basically goes like this a massive object collided with a baby Earth causing a spray of debris that eventually coalesced into our satellite the debris has to settle into something like a ring of particles before it eventually collapses into one big ball which eats up a lot of time but one research team proposes that the moon went through single stage formation meaning it went directly from debris spray to Celestial body now.

the team didn't start their research as champions of some pre-existing single stage formation hypothesis they were just trying to figure out what scenarios scientists should consider when investigating the moon's formation and to do that they used a brand new computer model that treated the Earth the object that smacked into the Earth and the moon like collections of a hundred million tiny particles that's about a hundred times more particles than most simulations keep track of when modeling the moon's origin story and that extra level of detail provided some Curious results after testing over 400 impact scenarios involving different angles speeds and variations.

on how head-on the Collision was they realized that Not only was an hours-long single stage formation possible it was probable and this isn't just a quirky simulation result a super quick formation would actually help explain in a few things about the moon like it's tilted orbit and thin crust but right now the whole thing is just a proposal in order to move forward with the idea that the moon formed this rapid way we would need to find physical evidence in rock samples until then it's kind of fun to imagine an alien astronomer watching a baby Earth deciding to take a nap and then waking up to find there was a whole Moon there so here's to all the research astronomers did this past year regardless of how many pretty space picks go along with it and here's to all of you we can't thank you enough for your support and if you're hungry for even more 2022 space news you missed because you were busy looking at Webb's pretty space pictures stay tuned we've got another Roundup coming out next week foreign.