Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Brammer
This image, not unlike a pointillist painting,
shows the star-studded centre of the Milky Way towards the
constellation of Sagittarius. The crowded centre of our galaxy contains
numerous complex and mysterious objects that are usually hidden at
optical wavelengths by clouds of dust — but many are visible here in
these infrared observations from Hubble.
However, the most famous cosmic object in this image still remains
invisible: the monster at our galaxy’s heart called Sagittarius A*.
Astronomers have observed stars spinning around this supermassive black
hole (located right in the centre of the image), and the black hole
consuming clouds of dust as it affects its environment with its enormous
gravitational pull.
Infrared observations can pierce through thick obscuring material to
reveal information that is usually hidden to the optical observer. This
is the best infrared image of this region ever taken with Hubble, and
uses infrared archive data from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, taken in
September 2011. It was posted to Flickr by Gabriel Brammer, a fellow at
the European Southern Observatory based in Chile. He is also an ESO photo ambassador.
Source: NASA, ESA - Space Telescope
