The centre of the Milky Way

The centre of our Milky Way galaxy is located in the southern constellation Sagittarius (The Archer) and is "only" 26,000 light-years away. On high-resolution images, it is possible to discern thousands of individual stars within the central, one light-year wide region.

Using the motions of these stars to probe the gravitational field, observations over the last decade have shown that a mass of about 3 million times that of the Sun is concentrated within a radius of only 10 light-days of the compact radio and X-ray source SgrA* (Sagittarius A) at the centre of the star cluster. This means that SgrA* is the most likely counterpart of the black hole believed to exist at the centre of our Galaxy.

This image was obtained in mid-2002 with the NACO instrument at the 8.2-m VLT Yepun telescope. It combines frames in three infrared wavebands between 1.6 and 3.5 µm. The compact objects are stars and their colours indicate their temperature (blue ="hot", red ="cool"). There is also diffuse infrared emission from interstellar dust between the stars.

A newer image of that region has been published in 2008; see image eso0846a.

Herkunftsnachweis:

ESO

Über das Bild

ID:eso0226a
Typ:Beobachtung
Veröffentlichungsdatum:16. Oktober 2002
Dazugehörige Veröffentlichungen:eso0226
Größe:2598 x 2362 px

Über das Objekt

Name:Milky Way Galactic Centre
Typ:Milky Way : Galaxy
Entfernung:25000 Lichtjahre
Constellation:Sagittarius
Kategorie:Galaxies

Bildformate

Großes JPEG
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Bildschirm-Hintergrundbilder

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Koordinaten

Position (RA):17 45 40.04
Position (Dec):-29° 0' 26.95"
Field of view:0.30 x 0.28 arcminutes
Orientierung:Die Nordrichtung liegt 0.3° rechts zur Vertikale

Farben & Filter

SpektralbereichWellenlängeTeleskop
Infrarot
K
2.18 μmVery Large Telescope
NACO