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The Milky Way is our home galaxy, a vast collection of stars, planets and other celestial bodies bound together by gravity. It is a barred spiral galaxy, which means it has a central bar-shaped structure made up of stars, with spiral arms extending outward.
NASA has captured detailed images of the galaxy using its infrared cameras.
Here are the top 5 discoveries from NASA. Check them out:
The photo, a whole-sky map from NASA’s contributing ESA mission Planck, shows the Milky Way galaxy ablaze with dust. The towers of fiery colors are actually dust in the galaxy and beyond that has become polarized. The data show light of 353 gigahertz, or 0.85-millimeter wavelength, which is longer than the light visible to our eyes.
Using data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, scientists discovered a huge, mysterious structure in our galaxy. This structure looks like a pair of bubbles extending above and below the center of our galaxy. Each lobe is 25,000 light-years long and the entire structure may be only a few million years old.
This panorama provides an unprecedented X-ray view from above and below the galaxy’s center. This new survey builds on previous observations from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, combining images from 370 different points of the telescope. In this main image, different bands of X-rays from Chandra (orange, green, purple) have been combined with radio data (gray). These data reveal threads of super-hot gas and magnetic fields near the galaxy’s center.
NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) observed magnetic fields in this composite image of Centaurus A. They are shown as streamlines on an image of the galaxy taken at visible and submillimeter wavelengths by the European Southern Observatory and the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (orange), at X-ray wavelengths by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue) and at infrared by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope (dark red).
The center of our galaxy is hidden from the eyes of optical telescopes by clouds of dust and gas. But in this stunning view, infrared cameras on NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope pierce through much of the dust, revealing the stars in the crowded galactic center region.
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