Telescope on Airplane Captures Never Seen Before Details of Our Milky Way Galaxy

[Judi Lynn]

TOPICS:Ames Research Center
By NASA JANUARY 7, 2020



SOFIA Reveals New View of Milky Way’s Center

NASA has captured an extremely crisp infrared image of the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Spanning a distance of more than 600 light-years, this panorama reveals details within the dense swirls of gas and dust in high resolution, opening the door to future research into how massive stars are forming and what’s feeding the supermassive black hole at our galaxy’s core.

Among the features coming into focus are the jutting curves of the Arches Cluster containing the densest concentration of stars in our galaxy, as well as the Quintuplet Cluster with stars a million times brighter than our Sun. Our galaxy’s black hole takes shape with a glimpse of the fiery-looking ring of gas surrounding it.

The new view was made possible by the world’s largest airborne telescope, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA. Flying high in the atmosphere, this modified Boeing 747 pointed its infrared camera called FORCAST – the Faint Object Infrared Camera for the SOFIA Telescope – to observe warm, galactic material emitting at wavelengths of light that other telescopes could not detect. The image combines SOFIA’s new perspective of warm regions with previous data exposing very hot and cold material from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory.

An overview paper highlighting initial results has been submitted for publication to the Astrophysical Journal. The image was presented for the first time at the American Astronomical Society annual meeting this week in 2020 in Honolulu.

More:
https://scitechdaily.com/telescope-on-airplane-captures-never-seen-before-details-of-our-milky-way-galaxy/

[lark]

1. Amazing!

[eppur_se_muova]

2. That's a 106" mirror, for those wondering ...

For astronomy, size matters.

[Bayard]

3. Kind of puts us in perspective, doesn't it?

To quote an old tshirt--Beam me up, Scotty. There's no intelligent life down here.

[dlk]

4. Amazing photos! Thanks for sharing

[calimary]

5. I LOVE this stuff!