Video: Zoom to the center of the Milky Way

[Panich52]

EarthSky

Video: Zoom to the center of the Milky Way
Aug 13, 2015
by Deborah Byrd in Videos » Science Wire, Space

This zoom sequence stars with a view of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, then zooms in towards the crowded center of the galaxy, in the direction of the constellation of Sagittarius the Archer. Then the scene shifts to an infrared view, which lets us see see through the dusty clouds in this direction and get a close-up view of objects orbiting the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy.

Credit: ESO/MPE/Nick Risinger (skysurvey.org)/VISTA/J. Emerson/Digitized Sky Survey 2

http://earthsky.org/space/video-zoom-in-to-the-center-of-the-milky-way?utm_source=EarthSky+News&utm_campaign=52e5c89c53-EarthSky_News&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c643945d79-52e5c89c53-393525109

[PJMcK]

1. My god, it's full of stars!

Thanks for posting this video, Panich52. It's beautiful and awe-inspiring especially when one realizes how far away from each other all these stars are. The Milky Way galaxy is estimated to have a diameter of somewhere between 100,000 and 180,000 light years with hundreds of billions of stars. It's huge! And it's only one of the billions of galaxies in the observable universe. Truly a humbling perspective.