Today’s Solutions: November 21, 2024

If you ever wondered what the center of our galaxy looks like, you can now satiate your curiosity by checking out a new image from NASA that depicts it in unprecedented detail.

The marvelous picture of our galaxy’s violent, super-energized “downtown” (which you can see above) is a composite of 370 observations made over the past two decades by NASA’s orbiting Chandra X-ray observatory. It depicts billions of stars and countless black holes in the center of the Milky Way.

In addition to data from Chandra — an observatory that was launched in 1999 and is in an extreme oval orbit around Earth — the image also includes observations from a radio telescope in South Africa. Astronomer Daniel Wang from the University of Massachusetts Amherst has worked on it over the past year while stuck at home during the pandemic.

“What we see in the picture is a violent or energetic ecosystem in our galaxy’s downtown,” said Mr. Wang. “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.”

According to SkyNews, the hectic, high-energy galactic center depicted in the image is 26,000 light-years away — which means that it would take you about 967,200,000 years to get there with NASA’s Discovery Space Shuttle.

Solutions News Source Print this article
More of Today's Solutions

Changemakers of the week: GRuB and SparkNJ

Every day on the Optimist Daily, we report on solutions from around the world. Though we love solutions big and small, the ones that ...

Read More

The giant beneath the waves: world’s largest coral found in the Pacific

BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM In a world where bad news about the environment routinely outweighs good news, scientists have discovered an incredible ...

Read More

Tortoise discovered in a home in Pompeii

Almost 2000 years after the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius and its trapping of the city of Pompeii in time, archaeologists are still making discoveries ...

Read More

Revel at the most detailed image of our universe yet

Here at The Optimist Daily, we have been sharing every exciting step of the James Webb Telescope’s journey, from its long-awaited launch, to when ...

Read More