NASA releases a stunning new image of downtown Milky Way

Cape Canaveral, Florida (AP) – NASA has released a stunning new image of the violent and vibrant “downtown” of our galaxy.

It is a compilation of 370 observations over the past two decades from the Chandra X-ray Orbital Observatory, which depicts billions of stars and countless black holes in the center or core of the Milky Way galaxy. However, a radio telescope in South Africa also contributed to the image.

Daniel Wang, an astronomer at the University of Massachusetts, said Friday that he spent a year working on the issue while he was stuck at home during the pandemic.

“What we are seeing in the picture is a violent or active ecosystem in the middle of our galaxy,” Wang said in an e-mail. There are many remnants of supernovae, black holes, and neutron stars. Each point or every feature of the X-ray represents an active source, usually in the middle. “

This noisy, high-energy center of the galaxy is 26,000 light-years away.

His work appears in the June issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Chandra was launched in 1999 and orbits the Earth in an intense elliptical orbit.

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