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Hubble Peers Into the Heart of the Milky Way Galaxy

Infrared hubble image of a star cluster at the core of the milky way
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA, Acknowledgment: T. Do, A.Ghez (UCLA), V. Bajaj (STScI)

Peering deep into the dusty heart of our Milky Way galaxy using infrared vision, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope reveals a rich tapestry of more than half a million stars. Except for a few blue foreground stars, the stars are part of the Milky Way’s nuclear star cluster, the most massive and densest star cluster in our galaxy. So packed with stars, it is equivalent to having a million suns crammed between us and our closest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri. At the very hub of our galaxy, this star cluster surrounds the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole, which is about 4 million times the mass of our sun.

More information and annotated images: Hubble’s Journey to the Center of our Galaxy

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Last Updated
Oct 04, 2023
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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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