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Deep into Milky Way

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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Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech⁣
Milky Way - Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech⁣

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