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Core of the Milky Way

Core of the Milky Way

This sweeping panorama, 300 light-years in width, is the sharpest infrared picture ever made of the core of our Milky Way galaxy. It offers a nearby laboratory for how massive stars form and influence their environment in the often-violent nuclear regions of other galaxies. The galactic core is obscured in visible light by intervening dust clouds, but infrared light penetrates the dust. This view combines the sharp imaging of Hubble’s Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) with color imagery from a previous Spitzer Space Telescope survey done with its Infrared Astronomy Camera (IRAC). The NICMOS mosaic required 144 Hubble orbits to make 2,304 exposures.

Image Credit: NASA

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Last Updated
Apr 17, 2023
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NASA Hubble Mission Team

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A spiral galaxy seen directly from the side, such that its disk looks like a narrow diagonal band across the image. A band of dark dust covers the disk in the center most of the way out to the ends, and the disk glows around that. In the center of the galaxy, a whitish circle of light bulges out above and below the disk. Each end of the disk curves slightly. The background is black and mostly empty.
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