Using x-ray light, NASA astronomers have revealed a striking new image of what the centre of our Milky Way galaxy looks like—enormous clouds of gas that glow at 10-million degrees and huge clusters of dying or dead stars.
The super-dense centre of our galaxy has remained invisible to conventional optical telescopes because clouds of dust interfere with the view.
The orbiting Chandra X-ray observatory collected the image, which was presented to the American Astronomical Society. Astronomers hope the Chandra telescope will allow them to take a detailed census of many types of stellar objects in our galaxy. The central feature of the image is a huge white blob in the center of the frame, hypothesized to contain a supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way—2.6 million times as massive as the Sun.
