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The Center of the Galaxy

Posted by michael on from the hole-in-the-middle-of-it-all dept.

Dr. A. van Code writes: "NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has captured a stunning view of the center of our Milky Way galaxy, with hundreds of white dwarf stars, neutron stars and black holes bathed in an incandescent fog of 10-million-degree gas around a supermassive black hole. Daniel Wang of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and co-workers took the 30 separate images covering a 400- by 900-light-year swath of the center of the galaxy, a region 26,000 light years away from Earth, using the orbiting X-ray satellite's Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer (ACIS). His paper appears in the Jan. 10, 2002, issue of the journal Nature. There is also a Chandra page at Harvard, and an AP wire story."

5 of 14 comments (clear)

  1. A bit grainy by imrdkl · · Score: 3, Informative
    Downloading the medium image yields an approximate screen ratio:

    1 pixel = 1/2 light year

  2. Re:Where were they 3 months ago? by redcliffe · · Score: 3, Informative

    The problem is that there is a heck of a lot of dust, and stars in the way. You need to try and peer between the stars, and through the dust. Visible light just won't do it. Often they use infrared, radio or x-ray for this. This one is an X-ray image.

  3. Daniel Wang's Research Group by Nissyen · · Score: 3, Informative

    For more information about the research that Daniel Wang and his group are doing at UMass amherst you can visit his website.

    --
    Idol Star Astronomer
  4. Re:Multicolored Stars by anxious · · Score: 3, Informative

    Remember, this is an X-Ray image. The picture is a false color image that shows 3 different colors: blue for high energy, green for medium energy and red for low energy. I first saw this at the Astronomy Picture of the Day.

  5. Re:Multicolored Stars by esonik · · Score: 4, Informative
    from the chandra site:
    The supermassive black hole at the center of the Galaxy is located inside the bright white patch in the center of the image. The colors indicate X-ray energy bands - red (low), green (medium), and blue (high).


    Also very interesting is the part about chandra's hardware. It's not at all easy to make optics for x-rays.