The center of our Milky Way galaxy is a cosmic web of hot gas and magnetic fields, centered on a supermassive black hole.

The US space agency has released a special panorama of our galactic center. The center of the Milky Way is 26,000 light-years from Earth. The cosmic masterpiece was created by combining data from South Africa’s MeerKAT radio telescope and NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory.

The mosaic is the result of 370 Chandra observations from 1999 to 2019. A total of 1,555 hours and 26 minutes of observations, which amounts to more than 64 days.

Sagittarius A*
Sagittarius A* can be seen exactly in the center of the photo. This is a supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. This black hole has been very active lately and varies in brightness regularly. This is due to the material falling into the black hole. “Before the material disappears completely, it first heats up and starts to radiate,” says astrophysicist Rudy Wijnands. Scientias.nl. “The amount of radiation we see is directly related to the amount of material falling into the black hole. So as the black hole gets brighter, more matter falls into the black hole.”

A wire of super hot gas
The photo shows a remarkably long wire of super-hot gas, namely G0.17-0.41. This thread is twenty light-years long, but only 1/100th light-year wide. Such a wire is created by colliding magnetic fields. When magnetic fields collide, they become entangled and these threads of super-hot gas are formed. Astronomers suspect that these colliding magnetic fields could heat the gas between the stars – the so-called interstellar medium. This turbulence can eventually create new stars.

Clusters, stars and X-ray sources
Near the center, the Quintuplet cluster can be seen. This cluster is only four million years old and contains many young massive stars. Within this cluster is the Pistol Star, one of the brightest stars in the Milky Way. We also see several other clusters, such as the Arches clusters, many stars (the small dots) and bright X-ray sources (green circles).

The Galactic Center. Download a large version of this photo? Click here!

–

Chandra: almost as legendary as Hubble
The Chandra X-ray Observatory has been floating in space for more than 20 years now. During this period, the observatory made many special discoveries. For example, Chandra has photographed a jet of the black hole Sagittarius A*. This is a cosmic fountain of high-energy particles. Chandra photographed the stream coming from Sagittarius A. It turns out that the jet collides with gas in the vicinity. During the collision, X-rays and radio waves are produced, what has been observed by Chandra.

Chandra also made a beautiful mosaic of the center of the Milky Way before. The photo below is actually 400 by 900 light years in size. Hundreds of white dwarfs, neutron stars and stellar black holes revolve around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.