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.

Crédit:

ESO

À propos de l'image

Identification:eso0226a
Type:Observation
Date de publication:16 octobre 2002
Communiqués de presse en rapport:eso0226
Taille:2598 x 2362 px

À propos de l'objet

Nom:Milky Way Galactic Centre
Type:Milky Way : Galaxy
Distance:25000 années lumière
Constellation:Sagittarius
Catégorie:Galaxies

Image Formats

Grand JPEG
1015,6 Kio
JPEG taille écran
246,3 Kio

Fonds d'écran

1024x768
259,9 Kio
1280x1024
369,9 Kio
1600x1200
466,0 Kio
1920x1200
523,3 Kio
2048x1536
679,6 Kio

Coordinates

Position (RA):17 45 40.04
Position (Dec):-29° 0' 26.95"
Field of view:0.30 x 0.28 arcminutes
Orientation:North is 0.3° right of vertical

Couleurs & filtres

DomaineLongueur d'ondeTélescope
Infrarouge
K
2.18 μmVery Large Telescope
NACO