Washington, November 11: The US space agency NASA has released a unique composite image of the center of the Milky Way galaxy in celebration of the International Year of Astronomy 2009.
The composite image commemorates the 400 years since Galileo first turned his telescope to the heavens in 1609.
NASA’s Great Observatories — the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory — have collaborated to produce an unprecedented image of the central region of our Milky Way galaxy.
NASA officials said experts from the three observatories assembled the final never-before-seen image from large mosaic photo surveys taken by each telescope.
Each telescope’s contribution is presented in a different color:
– Yellow represents the near-infrared observations of Hubble. The observations outline the energetic regions where stars are being born as well as reveal hundreds of thousands of stars.
– Red represents the infrared observations of Spitzer. The radiation and winds from stars create glowing dust clouds that exhibit complex structures from compact, spherical globules to long, stringy filaments.
– Blue and violet represent the X-ray observations of Chandra. X-rays are emitted by gas heated to millions of degrees by stellar explosions and by outflows from the super-massive black hole in the galaxy’s center. The bright blue blob on the left side is emission from a double star system containing either a neutron star or a black hole.
When these views are brought together, this composite image provides one of the most detailed views ever of our galaxy’s mysterious core, NASA said.
—–Agencies