Near the heart of our Milky Way galaxy, about 26,000 light-years from Earth, is a bustling downtown shown in infrared from our Spitzer Space Telescope. One hundred thousand light-years across, featuring at least 100 billion stars, our spiral galaxy is kept together by a supermassive black hole estimated to be four million times as massive as our Sun.
Crowds of millions of stars create a blue haze that coalesces toward the center of the image, where green features represent carbon-rich dust molecules illuminated by starlight swirling around the galaxy’s core, and young stars generate a thermal glow seen in the yellow-red color. The brightest section of the image shows the immense, densely populated central star cluster in our galaxy, which astronomers have determined closely orbits a massive black hole at the center of our galaxy.
Pinpricks of light dot the dark blue background as it fades to light blue toward the center of the photo, giving way to a swirling mass of green, red, yellow, and white slashing horizontally across the middle of the image.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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