Wednesday 4 July 2012

Zooming Into The Center Of The Milky Way

This zoom sequence stars with a view of the Milky Way. We zoom in towards the crowded central region, in the constellation of Sagittarius (The Archer). By shifting to an infrared view we see through the dusty clouds in this direction and get a close up view of the objects orbiting the supermassive black hole that lies at the center of the Milky Way. The final views show the motion of a newly-discovered gas cloud that is falling rapidly towards the central black hole.
credit: ESO/MPE/Nick Risinger (skysurvey.org)/VISTA/J. Emerson/Digitized Sky Survey 2 Music: xxx
Source: http://www.eso.org/public/videos/eso1151d/