Latest Galactic Center Stories

The region around the center of our Milky Way galaxy glows colorfully in this new version of an image taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.The data were previously released as part of a long, 120-degree view of the plane our galaxy (see this page). Now, data from the very center of that picture are being presented at a different contrast to better highlight this jam-packed region. In visible-light pictures, it is all but impossible to see the heart of our galaxy, but infrared light...

An international research project involving the University of Adelaide has revealed that the magnetic field in the center of the Milky Way is at least 10 times stronger than the rest of the Galaxy.The evidence is significant because it gives astronomers a lower limit on the magnetic field, an important factor in calculating a whole range of astronomical data.Researchers from the Max-Planck-Institute for Nuclear Physics, the University of Adelaide, Monash University and the United States have...

A never-before-seen view of the turbulent heart of our Milky Way galaxy is being unveiled by NASA today. This event will commemorate the 400 years since Galileo first turned his telescope to the heavens in 1609.In celebration of this International Year of Astronomy, NASA is releasing images of the galactic center region as seen by its Great Observatories to more than 150 planetariums, museums, nature centers, libraries and schools across the country.The sites will unveil a giant,...

A dramatic new vista of the center of the Milky Way galaxy from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory exposes new levels of the complexity and intrigue in the Galactic center. The mosaic of 88 Chandra pointings represents a freeze-frame of the spectacle of stellar evolution, from bright young stars to black holes, in a crowded, hostile environment dominated by a central, supermassive black hole.Permeating the region is a diffuse haze of X-ray light from gas that has been heated to millions of...

The second of three images of ESO's GigaGalaxy Zoom project has just been released online. It is a new and wonderful 340-million-pixel vista of the central parts of our home galaxy as seen from ESO's Paranal Observatory with an amateur telescope. This 34 by 20-degree wide image provides us with a view as experienced by amateur astronomers around the world. However, its incredible beauty and appeal owe much to the quality of the observing site and the skills of Stéphane Guisard, the...

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has imaged a wild creature of the dark -- a coiled galaxy with an eye-like object at its center.The galaxy, called NGC 1097, is located 50 million light-years away. It is spiral-shaped like our Milky Way, with long, spindly arms of stars. The "eye" at the center of the galaxy is actually a monstrous black hole surrounded by a ring of stars. In this color-coded infrared view from Spitzer, the area around the invisible black hole is blue and the ring of...

A team of researchers working with data from ESA's Integral gamma-ray observatory has disproved theories that some form of dark matter explains mysterious radiation in the Milky Way. That this radiation exists has been known since the 1970s, and several theories have been proposed to explain it. Integral's unprecedented spectral and spatial resolution showed that it strongly peaks towards the center of the Galaxy, with an asymmetry along the Galactic disc.Several researchers have invoked a...

Scientists have discovered a new class of black hole that stands at a mass of more than 500 times that of the Sun.An international team of astronomers detailed the new discovery found in a galaxy some 290 million light years from Earth in the journal Nature.The team used the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton X-ray observatory to find HLX-1 (Hyper-Luminous X-ray source 1) that could stand as the "missing link" between supermassive black holes "“ several million to several billion times the...

Astronomers have unveiled an unprecedented new atlas of the inner regions of the Milky Way, our home galaxy, peppered with thousands of previously undiscovered dense knots of cold cosmic dust "” the potential birthplaces of new stars. Made using observations from the APEX telescope in Chile, this survey is the largest map of cold dust so far, and will prove an invaluable map for observations made with the forthcoming ALMA telescope, as well as the recently launched ESA Herschel space...

Astronomers have at last uncovered newborn stars at the frenzied center of our Milky Way galaxy. The discovery was made using the infrared vision of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.The heart of our spiral galaxy is cluttered with stars, dust and gas, and at its very center, a supermassive black hole. Conditions there are harsh, with fierce stellar winds, powerful shock waves and other factors that make it difficult for stars to form. Astronomers have known that stars can form in this chaotic...