Chandra Release - January 23, 2026

Visual Description: Sagittarius A* in our Galactic Center  


A very deep Chandra X-ray Observatory image around the Sagittarius A* supermassive black hole, located in the center of the Milky Way galaxy, is shown. The image is dominated by burnt orange, deep gold and blue hues, with a sprinkling of rich green. The area looks both intricate and full, with a dense population of tiny dots, along with larger clumps and diffuse areas and nebulous areas peeking through.

At the center of the image, there is a bright, lumpy area in pale gold showing the intense X-ray radiation emanating from the Sagittarius A* black hole. In the surrounding area, there are more smaller lumps layered throughout, feathering out to a large almost butterfly shape filling much of the screen. The image appears textured, like dozens of blue and orange glow worms are paused in their wriggling.

The image offers an unprecedented view of lobes of hot gas extending for a dozen light years on either side of the black hole. These lobes provide evidence for powerful eruptions occurring several times over the last ten thousand years. The image also contains several mysterious X-ray filaments, some of which may be huge magnetic structures interacting with streams of energetic electrons produced by rapidly spinning neutron stars. Such features are known as pulsar wind nebulas. Chandra has detected over 3,300 individual sources that emit X-rays in this field of view. This image is the sum of 86 observations added together, representing over three million seconds of Chandra observing time.