New photographs of the center of the Milky Way reveal the
chaotic environment at the heart of our galaxy, where a supermassive black hole
is thought to lurk.
The close-up
views come from two recent projects - one undertaken by an amateur astronomer.
Stephane Guisard, an engineer at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in
Chile, used his personal 10-cm telescope to take 1,200 individual images over
29 nights during his free time. He then combined the photos, which took a total
of more than 200 hours of exposure time, into a stunning mosaic image of the Milky
Way's center.
The vista reveals an area of the sky spanning from the
constellation Sagittarius to the constellation Scorpius. Running through the
image is the dusty track of the Milky
Way's disk - the dense Frisbee shape that contains the spiral arms of the
galaxy. Colorful
nebulae - including the pink cloud of the Lagoon Nebula (also known as
Messier 8) - where furious star formation is occurring - dot the scene.
"The area I have depicted in this image is an
incredibly rich region of the sky, and the one I find most beautiful,"
Guisard said.
Guisard's image was released as part of ESO's Gigagalaxy
Zoom project, which aims to connect images of the sky as seen with the naked
eye, to close-up views taken with amateur and professional telescopes. Members
of the public can explore the connected images online at http://www.gigagalaxyzoom.org/
to zoom in on the sky in extreme detail.
Another new look at the heart of the Milky Way comes from NASA's
Chandra X-ray Observatory. The deep image, a mosaic of images taken during 88
individual observation sessions, reveals the area around our galaxy's humongous
central
black hole, Sagittarius A*. The region is clouded with diffuse X-ray light
from young stars, dying stars, and even emerged poured out by the accretion
disk of material falling onto Sagittarius A*.
The images also show mysterious filaments, or strands of
X-ray light that scientists think represent large magnetic structures
interacting with streams of very energetic electrons released by rapidly
spinning neutron stars.
X-rays provide a window into this dramatic inner world, much
of which is shrouded from normal light by a thick veil of gas and dust. The new
data was released at the start of a symposium in Boston called "Chandra's
First Decade of Discovery."
The X-ray space telescope launched into orbit in July 1999.
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