The infrared vision of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope pierced the dusty heart of our Milky Way Galaxy to reveal more than half a million stars at its core.
This infrared image from Hubble shows Milky Way’s nuclear star cluster, the densest and most massive star cluster in our Galaxy. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble Heritage Team / STScI / AURA / T. Do & A. Ghez, UCLA / V. Bajaj, STScI.
The center of Milky Way Galaxy, approximately 27,000 light-years away in the constellation of Sagittarius, is a crowded place.
This region is so tightly packed that it is equivalent to having one million stars crammed into the volume of space between the Sun and Alpha Centauri, located 4.3 light-years away.
At the very hub of our Galaxy, this nuclear star cluster surrounds Sagittarius A*, Milky Way’s supermassive black hole.
The crowded center contains numerous objects that are hidden at visible wavelengths by thick clouds of dust in the disk of our Galaxy.
Astronomers used Hubble’s infrared vision to pierce through the dust in Galaxy’s disc that obscures the nuclear star cluster.
In this new image, they translated the infrared light, which is invisible to human eyes, into colors we can see.
The blue stars in the image are foreground stars, which are closer to Earth than the star cluster.
The red stars are either embedded or shrouded by intervening dust.
Very dense clouds of gas and dust are seen in silhouette, appearing dark against the bright background stars. These clouds are so thick that even Hubble’s infrared capability could not penetrate them.
In addition to the stars hidden by the dust astronomers estimate that there are about 10 million stars in the cluster which are too faint to see, even for Hubble.
This image, spanning 50 light-years across, is a mosaic stitched from nine separate images from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3).
