From today's featured articleKate Winslet (born 5 October 1975) is an award-winning English actress. She made her film debut playing a murderer in Heavenly Creatures (1994), and received her first BAFTA Award for playing Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility (1995). After her leading role in the epic romance Titanic (1997), she appeared in critically acclaimed period pieces, including Quills (2000) and Iris (2001). She starred in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Finding Neverland (2004), Little Children (2006), and Revolutionary Road (2008). For playing a Nazi camp guard in The Reader (2008), she won the BAFTA Award and Academy Award for Best Actress. In the 2010s, Winslet played a single mother in 1930s America in the miniseries Mildred Pierce (2011), joined the Divergent film series, and portrayed Joanna Hoffman in Steve Jobs (2015). Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2009. In 2012 she was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire. (Full article...)
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The Milky Way is the galaxy that contains the Solar System, with the name describing the galaxy's appearance from Earth: a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye. The term Milky Way is a translation of the Latin via lactea, from the Greek γαλαξίας κύκλος (galaxías kýklos, 'milky circle'). From Earth, the Milky Way appears as a band because its disk-shaped structure is viewed from its outer rim. Galileo Galilei first resolved the band of light into individual stars with his telescope in 1610. Until the early 1920s, most astronomers thought that the Milky Way contained all the stars in the Universe. Following the 1920 Great Debate between the astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, observations by Edwin Hubble showed that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies. This picture shows a portion of the Milky Way as seen from Cerro Paranal in Chile, home to the European Southern Observatory (ESO)'s Very Large Telescope, depicting the region spanning the constellations from Sagittarius to Scorpius. The colourful nebulae surrounding Rho Ophiuchi and Antares can be seen to the right, while the dusty lane of the galaxy runs obliquely through the image, dotted with reddish objects such as the Lagoon and Trifid Nebulae. This region of the Milky Way also includes the Galactic Center, likely containing a supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*. Photograph credit: ESO / Stéphane Guisard
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