NASA is at it yet again! The space agency has this time shared a marvelous image of what it likes to call Milky Way’s violent and super-energized “downtown.” The image is a composite of 370 observations recorded over a span of 20 years by the Chandra X-ray Observatory, which is in an extreme oval orbit.
The image depicts billions of stars and black holes that are located at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy. A radio telescope in South Africa was also used for the contrast of the image.
26,000 light-years away from Earth
Astronomer Daniel Wang of the University of Massachusetts Amherst said he worked on this is exquisite image while stuck at home due to the coronavirus pandemic lockdown.
“What we see in the picture is a violent or energetic ecosystem in our galaxy’s downtown,” Wang said. “There are a lot of supernova remnants, black holes, and neutron stars there. Each X-ray dot or feature represents an energetic source, most of which are in the center.”
The super-energized “downtown” shown in the image is located 26,000 light-years away. Wang’s work will be published in the June edition of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Unraveling mysteries of Milky Way
Recently, NASA also snapped an image of the oldest spiral galaxy, using its legendary Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble tracked 5 fast radio bursts (FRBs) to the spiral arms of 5 distant galaxies. The galaxy is said to be around 12 billion years old.
Besides, scientists from the University of Birmingham were recently able to date a few old stars in our galaxy precisely. The team used asteroseismology—the study of stellar oscillations— and merged it with kinematics and chemical abundances.
After studying nearly 100 red giant stars, researchers learned that some of these stars originally belonged to a satellite galaxy called Gaia-Enceladus that merged with the Milky Way galaxy around 8-11 billion years ago.
