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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."

1 of 14 comments (clear)

  1. 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.