Visions of the Galactic Core

Credit: NASA, ESA, CXC, SSC, and STScI

I imag­ine that when Galileo first turned a tele­scope to the heav­ens in 1609, he hoped that men would see won­ders beyond imag­i­na­tion. His obser­va­tions of the heav­ens changed the way we view the uni­verse. Every image returned from the great obser­va­to­ries, Hub­ble, Chan­dra and Spitzer, have been impres­sive and won­drous. Some of the images leave us speech­less, oth­ers remind us of art, spawn inspi­ra­tion and spur discussion.

To cel­e­brate the Inter­na­tional Year of Astron­omy, NASA unveiled a stun­ning image of the galac­tic core. Imag­ine look­ing at the cen­ter of our galaxy with eyes that see vis­i­ble light, infrared light or heat, and in X-ray. Give each a color; yel­low for vis­i­ble, red for infrared, of course, and blue for X-ray. Smash these together and the image pro­vides astronomers with one of the most detailed views into the furi­ous and mys­te­ri­ous cen­ter of our galaxy.

Each of these dif­fer­ent kinds of light reveals some­thing dif­fer­ent. With our eyes, we can see glow­ing clouds of gas and stars. Warm, glow­ing clouds of dust show up well in infrared images. Ghostly shapes of excited, hot gas or gas that’s strongly affected by mag­netic fields shine brightly in the X-ray images.

Wan­der around the image. The cen­ter is the bright white swirling area to the right of the cen­ter of the image. Stream­ing arcs of gas and dust show the edges of huge neb­ula that will cre­ate new stars one day. Below the arches of dust is a super clus­ter of stars called the Arches clus­ter. Thou­sands of blue suns heav­ier than our Sun are packed into this area.

Look for the bright blue glow to the left of the image. This is a binary star that shines brightly in X-ray. Astronomers think that this is could be a mas­sive star being orbited by a heavy neu­tron star or a black hole. Either of these com­pan­ions suck up mate­r­ial from the star. The star stuff gets heated to mil­lions of degrees and emits X-rays.

Just below and to the right of the blue glow of the X-ray binary, is a clumpy area called the Sickle. The Quin­tu­plet Clus­ter shown as a pink­ish glow, is carv­ing out a bub­ble in the Sickle. You can see the ele­phant trunk like fin­gers stick­ing out from the edge of the cloud. Just below the Quin­tu­plet Clus­ter is the Pis­tol Star, per­haps one of the most mas­sive stars in the Milky Way.

Can you see any shapes or ani­mals in the glow­ing stars and arches of gas and dust of this image?
The image shows us a tur­bu­lent and active galac­tic cen­ter. If we hopped in our star­ship and zipped off at the speed of light, we could enjoy this col­or­ful view of this part of our galaxy for more than 250 years. The galac­tic cen­ter is about 26,000 light-years from Earth toward the con­stel­la­tion of Sagittarius.