NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory Captures Photo of Center of Milky Way

NASA released a picture of the centre of the Milky Way on May 27, at a scale never seen before. The new image is built on a scale that extends much above and below the galactic plane — a disc-like space where most of the stars of the galaxy reside. The image captures, in its height, a distance of about 2000 light-years, which is billions of times compared to the distance between the sun and the Earth. The width of the image shows 1000 light-years of the distance across the galactic centre. NASA astronomer Daniel Wang used a giant amount of X-ray and radio data to build the composite panorama of the centre of the Milky Way. The unprecedented image was built upon data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, which is orbiting the Earth in space, and the MeerKAT radio telescope that is deployed in South Africa.

In the image, we can see clusters of stars, supernova explosions, gas clouds and the ultimate view of melting and bursting matter revolving around our galaxy’s central supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*. The orange and blue layer of the composite image was rendered using the x-ray data from Chandra Observatory whereas radio data from the MeerKAT radio telescope was used to render the lilac and grey layer. The new image also tells scientists about the weather of galactic space that is driven by the volatile phenomena visible in the picture.