Chandra Release - September 22, 2009

Visual Description: Galactic Center

This Chandra X-ray Observatory image showcases the Galactic Center of the Milky Way. The dominant colors in this image are red, orange, green and blue with patches of brown. The structure of the Galactic Center is complex and intricate, very densely packed with numerous dots, specks of light, clumps and streaks.  The image is actually a mosaic of 88 separate Chandra pointings. It also represents a freeze-frame of the spectacle of stellar evolution, from bright young stars to black holes, in a crowded, hostile environment dominated by a central, supermassive black hole.  Permeating the region is a diffuse haze of X-ray light from gas that has been heated to millions of degrees by winds from massive young stars. These winds appear to form more frequently here than elsewhere in the Galaxy due to the crowded environment of stellar explosions and outflows powered by the supermassive black hole known as Sagittarius A*. These winds appear as diffuse X-ray light. The thousands of point sources are produced by normal stars feeding material onto compact, stellar remnants: black holes, neutron stars and white dwarfs.