Milky Way Center - 3 Views (Poster - Paper Matte)

The center of our Milky Way (that bright white spot towards the center/right) is a composite of photos captured by the Chandra X-ray Observatory, Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Hubble Space Telescope. It is a combination of dust-ignoring infrared and x-ray light images that expose the explosive activity. The entire width of the image is about half a degree (same width in the night sky as the moon). The yellow and red "fingers" are hot gasses caused by thousands of stars.

Chandra's x-ray abilities expose the pink areas as low energy x-rays and the blue areas as high energy x-rays. All of those dots are x-rays irradiating from near black holes and other dense bodies. The bright spot of the photo shows x-ray light coming from super-heated gas from giant star gas, explosions, and from the area surrounding the supermassive black hole in the middle of our galaxy (which is ~4 million times more massive than the sun).