The latest image from the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton X-ray observatory portrays an unprecedented look into the unruly center of our Milky Way galaxy, a majestic place filled with the remnants of dead celestial entities and colorful elemental gases explosions.
Compiled by consolidating six weeks’ worth of observations from this region, the image encompasses the entire range of the X-ray beam spectrum, including energies equivalent to the light emitted by heavier elements produced in supernova explosions such as silicon, sulphur, and argon. This grants us an extended view of the galaxy’s center, revealing a number of black holes, stellar clusters, and gases coalescing together.
Breaking down the contents of the image, we observe a scattering of bright point-like objects representing binary star systems in which one of stars of the pair has reached the end of its life, transitioning into an extremely dense neutron star or black whose powerful gravitational pull is slowly leeching off the mass of its companion star and causing its heated up elements to release bright X-rays.
The central area in the image represents stellar clusters of young stars and diffuse gases in the process of forming new stars, in addition to the super massive black hole known as Sagittarius A*, an object which exhibits a mass a few million times greater than that of our Sun. While its intense brightness may run contradictory to conventional knowledge about black holes – that being that their force of attraction is so powerful that not even light can escape – the brightness is caused by the light being emitted from the surrounding debris.
Download the high-resolution image here .
Source: ESA
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