NASA has surprised all its space fans with a great treat: peeking into the heart of the Milky Way galaxy.
Captain Kirk may be right in saying that space is the final frontier. The problem is it sounds so vast we can't fully grasp it. A 37-second time-lapse video from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) may somehow do the trick.
The clip, uploaded on May 3, combined nine images obtained by Hubble Space Telescope between 2010 and 2014. The astronomers had to convert the infrared light into colors that can be perceived by the human eyes so we can fully appreciate them.
As a result, what we have is a glimpse of the galaxy as far as 50 light-years away.
So what can we observe from the time-lapse? First, we can now see the core of the Milky Way, which shows at least 500,000 stars.
"Except for a few blue, foreground stars, the stars are part of the Milky Way's nuclear star cluster, the most massive and densest stellar cluster in our galaxy," described NASA.
The space agency has further thrown in two amazing details about the star cluster found 27,000 light-years far.
One, it is actually very near a supermassive black hole, the mass of which is 4 million times that of the sun.
Supermassive black holes are called such because they are packed with so much mass (think of billions) they rank high among all the other stellar black holes. It's believed that there are only a few of them in the universe, they can be found in large galaxies such as ours.
The black hole, which is within Sagittarius A*, cannot be seen directly, but the strong gravitational force coming from it creates a unique pattern and trajectory for the stars. Moreover, the presence of a lot of stars has somehow obscured it.
The other extraoradinary fact is that while the stars captured by Hubble were few – there is an uncountable number of stars in the universe – they just remain a glimpse of what the region they're part of is all about.
"This region is so packed with stars, it is equivalent to having a million suns crammed into the volume of space between us and our closest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri, 4.3 light-years away," NASA further added.
So how is it to travel to the center of at least the Milky Way? Watch the video below. Enjoy!
