Skip to main content

Milky Way’s Center Will Be Revealed by NASA’s Webb Telescope

View Filtered Press Releases View All Press Releases
October 09, 2019 10:00AM (EDT)Release ID: 2019-52
The center of our Milky Way galaxy, shown in infrared light, nearly fills the entire image with stars, gas, and dust. The top portion, left to right, has shades of dark red. The middle portion is dark red at left, becomes brightest in the center, and then fades to oranges and pinks toward the right. The bottom part, while dark red on the left, ranges from black to red going right. Stars of various sizes and brightness are everywhere, like sand on a beach.

Summary

Galactic dust hides swarms of stars and black hole’s glowing disk

To understand galaxies throughout the universe, astronomers start by studying our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Observing the Milky Way is harder than it sounds because vast clouds of dust block light in all directions, particularly toward the galactic center. NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope will gather infrared light from the center of our galaxy that has passed through the dusty veil. It will examine stellar populations to learn how stars can survive that tumultuous region, which is bathed in harsh ultraviolet and X-ray light and wracked with gravitational tides. And if scientists are lucky, they’ll spot the faint, steady glow from matter spiraling around a supermassive black hole.

Lee esta historia en español.

Full Article

The center of our galaxy is a crowded place: A black hole weighing 4 million times as much as our Sun is surrounded by millions of stars whipping around it at breakneck speeds. This extreme environment is bathed in intense ultraviolet light and X-ray radiation. Yet much of this activity is hidden from our view, obscured by vast swaths of interstellar dust.  NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope is designed to view the universe in infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye, but is very important for looking at astronomical objects hidden by dust. After its launch, Webb will ...

Read More on NASA.gov

Callout: Full Press Release

Visit NASA Science to view the full news release including article text and associated Webb imagery, graphics, scientific visualizations, videos, captions, text descriptions, and other information.

News releases highlighting the discoveries of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope are produced for NASA by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, under NASA Contract NAS5-03127. News release content is developed by the News Team in STScI’s Office of Public Outreach.

End callout
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google

Contact our News Team 

Contact our Outreach Office