The Associated Press reported on May 29 that NASA has released a stunning image of the powerful, super-energetic “haunt” of our galaxy.
It is the combined result of 370 observations made by the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory over the past 20 years. The photo depicts the center of the Milky Way galaxy, with billions of stars and countless black holes. A radio telescope in South Africa also contributed to the image.
Daniel Wang, an astronomer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said Friday that he spent a year working on the problem while he was stuck at home during the epidemic.
What we see in the picture is a robust, or energetic, ecosystem at the center of our galaxy,” Daniel Wang said in an e-mail. There are a lot of supernova remnants, black holes and neutron stars there. Each X-ray spot represents a source of energy, most of which is at the center of the galaxy.”
The center of this busy, high-energy galaxy is 26,000 light-years away from Earth.
Daniel Wang’s work, published in the June issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The Chandra X-ray Observatory, launched in 1999, is in an extreme elliptical orbit around Earth.
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