Stunning Image Of Milky Way's Galactic Center Reveals Intense Ancient Star Burst

[Judi Lynn]

By Athena Chan
12/17/19 AT 8:05 PM

Thanks to the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) in the Chilean Atacama Desert, astronomers have uncovered new details about the history of star formation in the Milky Way. The high-resolution image of the Milky Way's galactic center revealed star bursts so intense that they led to over 100,000 supernovas.

Galactic Center

Researchers of a new study published in Nature Astronomy were able to capture incredibly detailed images of the Milky Way's galactic center thanks so an instrument on the VLT called HAWK-I, a wide-field imager that lets it see through dense interstellar gas and dust, thereby allowing it to see stars in the galaxy center that would otherwise be hidden.

. . .

Using these stunning images, the researchers found that about 80 percent of the stars at the central region of the Milky way were formed early in its history, between 8 and 13.5 billion years ago. This period of star formation was then followed by 6 billion quieter years in which only a few stars were born.

This period of quiet ended about a billion years ago when an intense burst of new star formation created new stars with a combined mass of tens of millions of suns in the central region of the Milky Way over a period of less than 100 million years.

More:
https://www.ibtimes.com/stunning-image-milky-ways-galactic-center-reveals-intense-ancient-star-burst-2886672

[tblue37]

1. Video:

[JoeOtterbein]

2. Truely...

...awesome!

[sinkingfeeling]

3. I was able to view the Milky Way at the Ngorongoro Crater a couple

of weeks ago. There's something to be said about the night sky far removed from artificial light.

[3Hotdogs]

4. Several national parks have Dark Sky festivals.

They are fun. I go to the one in Acadia National Park, Bar Harbor, Maine. It is in September at the time of the new moon.

[softydog88]

5. Just imagine what the James Webb telescope is going to reveal.

I cannot wait for that. I wish it weren't so badly delayed.

[Rainbow Droid]

6. LOOK. AT. THIS.

Last edited Wed Dec 18, 2019, 03:23 PM - Edit history (4)

and another one, starts the same at first but is longer, with the supermassive black hole and the inner orbits:

The last time I felt this way was seeing Powers of Ten for the first time. Breathtaking.

[AtheistCrusader]

13. 'Look at that, you son of a bitch'

“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.”

― Edgar Mitchell


Space has an incredible way of fixing our perspective on our place in the universe. Everyone should get a chance to experience it.

[Kitchari]

19. Incredibly beautiful

Thanks for posting

[Rainbow Droid]

21. I have watched this video every single day since I posted this, usually 5-10 times.

You can get hi-res versions on the official site. I highly recommend them.

[Steven Maurer]

7. The thing most people don't understand about the Milky Way...

...is how big it really is.

Here's a comparative way to think about it. If you built a scale model where Sun were the size of a white blood cell, and the Earth were the size of a virus, and the speed of light was about 4 1/2 inches a day, then our galaxy would be as wide as the entire United States. Of course, of galaxy is a pinwheel, so it really would be about the size of the entire North American continent.

That's 105,000 years for the fastest possible thing to travel from one end of it to the other.

[LudwigPastorius]

8. ...and we (the Milky Way) are only one of...

about 2 trillion galaxies in the univers.

As of today, two trillion galaxies should exist within our observable Universe.

Yet, that number is so remarkably different from the lower-limit estimate we came up with from the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field image. Two trillion versus 176 billion means that more than 90% of the galaxies within our Universe are beyond the detection capabilities of even humanity's greatest observatory, even if we look for nearly a month at a time.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/10/18/this-is-how-we-know-there-are-two-trillion-galaxies-in-the-universe/#2fdc5e395a67

[Kaleva]

12. That's 105,000 earth years. Traveling near the speed of light greatly compresses time.

IIRC, it would be possible to travel to nearby galaxies in a person's lifetime if they could fly near the speed of light.

[Steven Maurer]

15. It would only seem so from their perspective

Those galaxies would be vastly different when they got there.

[Kaleva]

16. But their perspective is the only one that matters as they are the ones traveling

Besides, by the time light emitted from far off galaxies reaches earth, millions of earth years have already passed so they have already changed most likely.

[Steven Maurer]

17. The bottom line is if you tried to travel halfway across the universe...

...by the time you got there, the universe as you know it would no longer exist.

Star Trek, indeed most of space-borne science fiction, is retelling the age of sail in space. But the reality is far different, colder, more hostile to anything we would ever imagine.

[Kaleva]

18. The expansion of space itself precludes us from ever reaching further parts of the universe

Traveling at the velocity of 0.99999980 the speed of light, in 242,719 earth years, a ship would have traveled 242,406 light years but the crew would have only aged 280 days.

https://www.fourmilab.ch/cship/movies/stillframes/flythru/29.html

The Andromeda Nebula is 2.5 million light-years from Earth.

[AllaN01Bear]

9. billions and billions.

[GreatCaesarsGhost]

10. Thanks for posting

[burrowowl]

11. Thanks for posting

[colorado_ufo]

14. For me, anyway, the final question is:

What, exactly, is the universe?

[Kitchari]

20. So beautiful

Your posts are always informative and much appreciated