NASA has published an impressive photo tsentra our galaxy – Ghhauto: Russian top stories

02.04.2016 22:03

Hubble Space Telescope managed peered deep into our galaxy, photographed its center in the infrared range. The image of the central region of the Milky Way has been posted on the official website of the American space agency NASA.

The plot of the starry sky, was captured in a picture, is at a distance of 27 thousand light-years away from our planet. Except bluish stars in the foreground, all trapped “in the frame” points are a single cluster of stars, one of the biggest in our galaxy.

Scientists believe that these stars are surrounded by a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, The mass which is about four million times the mass of the sun.

Existing data indicate that only a portion of the Milky way, set down in a picture, maybe there are more than 10 million stars. The picture covers the length of the space station about 50 light-years

How to tell the experts NASA, astrophysicists for similar images are far beyond the aesthetic value -. Through them, scientists can obtain information about the mass of the stars and their chemical composition. Also similar observations to learn more about the history of this cluster of stars, and to some extent about the whole of our galaxy. In particular, experts are hoping to find an answer to the question how the cluster was formed – formed if a large number of different stars next to each other at once, or they were gradually “tightened” in the center of the universe from its different sections.

In the center of our galaxy is very close. This image, obtained with the help of WFC3 camera (Wide Field Camera 3) space telescope “Hubble”, covers an area of ​​a width of about 50 light-years, and fell on him, more than 500 000 stars. And almost all of them, except for a few blue stars in the foreground belong to the cluster around the center of the Milky Way, remote from us by about 27 000 light-years. The density of stars in this cluster is that the sphere diameter of 4.3 light years (which is the distance from the Sun to our nearest star system Alpha Centauri), would put a million stars! In addition to similar clusters in the Andromeda galaxy is – the most dense and massive known star cluster in the Local Group

It would seem that under these parameters the center of the galaxy should be readily visible in every detail, but it is not.. Its up to us to block a large cloud of interstellar dust, which greatly weakened and actually block not only optical, but also ultraviolet and soft X-rays. But the dust is almost transparent to infrared radiation, and it allows scientists to look inside dust clouds, securely hide the galactic center by conventional optical astronomy. Other “windows” in this world are, for example, radio and gamma-ray astronomy.

WFC3 camera shoots just in the infrared part of the spectrum. Discussed image was obtained by adding and processing mosaic of nine individual images sent “Hubble” in September 2011. The colors in this image conditional: the redder the more through the thick layer of dust was the light from the stars on the way to the camera lens. However, some very dense gas and dust clouds are so impermeable that appear black spots that what is behind them, it is not visible even in infrared telescopes. According to some estimates, hidden in the dust are still at least 10 million star clusters.

At the heart of the image, in the area of ​​greatest concentration of reddish star circled circle, probably a supermassive black hole, which is designated Sagittarius A * * (because it is located in the constellation Sagittarius in our sky). Its weight is estimated at 4.31 million solar masses (which, incidentally, is not so much compared with other galaxies of comparable sizes, the central black hole that may have a mass of up to billions of solar masses).

The center of our Galaxy is under the close supervision of astronomers who are used to this and ground and space observatories. With the development of observational techniques and the growth of computing power, scientists can look deeper, gradually approaching to the very center of the galaxy. Discussed was the image is the most detailed of the resulting in “okoloopticheskih” spectrum bands. On the collage below shows how over time, astronomers have obtained more and more details of the galactic center.

This is not the first photograph taken by the orbiting observatory “Hubble”, submitted by the general public. In particular, NASA has recently presented a snapshot of galaxies merging into a single entity, which is called MACS J0416.1-2403 – this image the astronomers call “cosmic kaleidoscope.” Another picture, by the unofficial name of “the sky with diamonds”, depicts the star cluster Trumpler 14 in the Carina Nebula Eta.