Zooming Into The Center Of The Milky Way

This zoom sequence stars with a view of the Milky Way. We zoom in towards the crowded central region, in the constellation of Sagittarius (The Archer). By shifting to an infrared view we see through the dusty clouds in this direction and get a close up view of the objects orbiting the supermassive black hole that lies at the center of the Milky Way. The final views show the motion of a newly-discovered gas cloud that is falling rapidly towards the central black hole.



This animation shows not only the true motions of many stars orbiting the central black hole in the Milky Way but also the expected behavior of the gas cloud.

What wonders lie at the center of our Galaxy? In Jules Verne's science fiction classic A Journey to the Center of the Earth, Professor Liedenbrock and his fellow explorers encounter many strange and exciting wonders. Astronomers already know of some of the bizarre objects that exist at our Galactic center, including like vast cosmic dust clouds, bright star clusters, swirling rings of gas, and even a supermassive black hole. Much of the Galactic Center is shielded from our view in visible light by the intervening dust and gas, but it can be explored using other forms of electromagnetic radiation. The above video is actually a digital zoom into the Milky Way's center which starts by utilizing visible light images from the Digitized Sky Survey. As the movie proceeds, the light shown shifts to dust-penetrating infrared and highlights gas clouds that were recently discovered to be falling toward central black hole.

APOD

Amazing ! thank you for posting

reply to post by elevenaugust


Can't add anything but a flag and a star to that.

Thanks for sharing.

reply to post by elevenaugust


Wow! And, every yellow object is a sun? Just wow!