Fact Sheet
Busy Hub
Billowing clouds of gas, dark fingers of cold dust, and thousands of hot young stars populate the center of the Milky Way galaxy in this new infrared view. The image, which includes observations by the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, spans 300 light-years. Recent observations detected 600,000 newly formed stars outside the bright clusters that highlight this image. A supermassive black hole sits at the center of the image, surrounded by a bright swirl of gas. The black hole is far too small to see. The galaxy's center is about 27,000 light-years away. [NASA/ESA/Q.D. Wang (Univ. Mass.-Amherst)/JPL/S. Stolovy (SSC/Caltech)]
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