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Center of the Milky Way Galaxy IV – Composite
NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScI
2009-11-10
- Classification
- Photograph
- Museum
- Wikimedia Commons
- Credit line
- http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA12348 See also http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/opo0928a/ and http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2009/28/image/a/
- Rights
- Public domain, as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its museum says too little about what it shows to place it for younger viewers. How works are placed
About this work
In celebration of the International Year of Astronomy 2009, NASA's Great Observatories -- the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory -- have produced a matched trio of images of the central region of our Milky Way galaxy. Each image shows the telescope's different wavelength view of the galactic center region, illustrating the unique science each observatory conducts.
In this spectacular image, observations using infrared light and X-ray light see through the obscuring dust and reveal the intense activity near the galactic core. Note that the center of the galaxy is located within the bright white region to the right of and just below the middle of the image. The entire image width covers about one-half a degree, about the same angular width as the full moon.
Each telescope's contribution is presented in a different colour:
Yellow represents the near-infrared observations of Hubble. The galactic center is marked by the bright patch in the lower right. Along the left side are large arcs of warm gas that have been heated by clusters of bright massive stars. In addition, Hubble uncovered many more massive stars across the region.…
