NASA has captured an extremely crisp
infrared image of the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Spanning a distance of
more than 600 light-years, this panorama reveals details within the dense
swirls of gas and dust in high resolution, opening the door to future research
into how massive stars are forming and what’s feeding the supermassive black
hole at our galaxy’s core.
Among the
features coming into focus are the jutting curves of the Arches Cluster containing the densest
concentration of stars in our galaxy, as well as the Quintuplet Cluster with stars a million
times brighter than our Sun. Our galaxy’s black hole takes shape with a glimpse
of the fiery-looking ring of gas surrounding it.
The new view
was made possible by the world’s largest airborne telescope, the Stratospheric
Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA. Flying high in the atmosphere,
this modified Boeing 747 pointed its infrared camera called FORCAST – the Faint
Object Infrared Camera for the SOFIA Telescope – to observe warm, galactic
material emitting at wavelengths of light that other telescopes could not detect.
The image combines SOFIA’s new perspective of warm regions with previous data
exposing very hot and cold material from NASA’s Spitzer Space
Telescope and the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space
Observatory.
An overview
paper highlighting initial results has been submitted for publication to
the Astrophysical Journal. The image was presented for the
first time at the American Astronomical Society annual meeting this week in
2020 in Honolulu.
“It’s incredible to see our galactic
center in detail we’ve never seen before,” said James Radomski, a Universities
Space Research Association scientist at the SOFIA Science Center at NASA’s Ames
Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. “Studying this area has been like
trying to assemble a puzzle with missing pieces. The SOFIA data fills in some
of the holes, putting us significantly closer to having a complete picture.”
Story via NASA
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