View of the Heart of our Milky Way from Earth
The vast edge-on stretch of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is seen intersecting the night sky above the silhouetted Rocky Mountains in this photograph. The Milky Way noticeably widens at lower right. This wider area is the central hub, or bulge, of our galaxy.
Peering into a very narrow region of the core, astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to study the compositions and motions of 10,000 Sun-like stars, as seen in the inset Hubble image. The analysis reveals that our galaxy's bulge is an unexpectedly dynamic environment of stars of various ages zipping around at different speeds, like travelers bustling
about a busy airport. The study yields important new clues to the complexity of the central bulge and our Milky Way's evolution over billions of years.
The Hubble image is a composite of exposures taken in near-infrared and visible light with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3. The observations are part of two Hubble surveys: the Galactic Bulge Treasury Program and the Sagittarius Window Eclipsing Extrasolar Planet Search.
The center of our galaxy is 26,000 light-years away.
Credits
NASA, ESA, and Z. Levay (STScI)| About The Object | |
|---|---|
| Object Name | Milky Way Galaxy |
| Object Description | Ground-based View of the Milky Way from Rocky Mountain National Park |
| Constellation | Sagittarius |
| About The Object | |
|---|---|
| Object Name | A name or catalog number that astronomers use to identify an astronomical object. |
| Object Description | The type of astronomical object. |
| R.A. Position | Right ascension – analogous to longitude – is one component of an object's position. |
| Dec. Position | Declination – analogous to latitude – is one component of an object's position. |
| Constellation | One of 88 recognized regions of the celestial sphere in which the object appears. |
| Distance | The physical distance from Earth to the astronomical object. Distances within our solar system are usually measured in Astronomical Units (AU). Distances between stars are usually measured in light-years. Interstellar distances can also be measured in parsecs. |
| Dimensions | The physical size of the object or the apparent angle it subtends on the sky. |
| About The Data | |
| Data Description |
|
| Instrument | The science instrument used to produce the data. |
| Exposure Dates | The date(s) that the telescope made its observations and the total exposure time. |
| Filters | The camera filters that were used in the science observations. |
| About The Image | |
| Image Credit | The primary individuals and institutions responsible for the content. |
| Publication Date | The date and time the release content became public. |
| Color Info | A brief description of the methods used to convert telescope data into the color image being presented. |
| Orientation | The rotation of the image on the sky with respect to the north pole of the celestial sphere. |
