Sustainability Environment

NASA releases spectacular new photograph of Milky Way that took 20 years to make

by Christian Spencer | June 7, 2021 | Jun. 07, 2021

NASA/Getty Images

Story at a glance

  • The Milky Way galaxy is estimated to contain hundreds of millions of black holes.
  • It took 20 years to photograph the galaxy using two different space telescopes.
  • Several photographs were taken over two decades to depict the galaxy as a whole.

It took two decades to capture this latest image of the Milky Way.

NASA managed to capture the view of the Milky Way galaxy’s “violent downtown” area by  composing 370 observations, including of several black holes in the heart of the galaxy, The Associated Press reported.

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“What we see in the picture is a violent or energetic ecosystem in our galaxy’s downtown,” astronomer Daniel Wang of the University of Massachusetts Amherst told the Associated Press.

“There are a lot of supernova remnants, black holes and neutron stars there. Each X-ray dot or feature represents an energetic source, most of which are in the center.”

Using data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, one of NASA’s flagship space telescopes that was launched in 1999, and the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa, a system of 64 antennas in the Northern Cape of South Africa, Wang pieced together the photographs all while working from home over the past year. He first published his findings to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society journal.

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