Galactic Center (Survey) Animation
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NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has made a stunning, high-energy panorama of the central regions of our Milky Way galaxy. Like a sprawling megalopolis, the image reveals hundreds of white dwarf stars, neutron stars and black holes bathed in an incandescent fog of multimillion-degree gas around a supermassive black hole. These images give a new perspective on how the turbulent Galactic Center region affects the evolution of the Galaxy as a whole. In this animation, the Chandra X-ray image is zoomed in, then fades into the same region of the Galactic Center for the VLA radio image (red) followed by the MSX mid-infrared image (green) and finally into the multiwavelength image that combines X-ray (blue), infrared (green) and radio (red).
[Run time = 0:26 sec]
(Animation: CXC/A.Hobart; Images: X-ray: NASA/UMass/D.Wang et al., Radio: NRAO/AUI/NSF, Mid-Infrared: MSX)