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Astronomy

X-rays reveal the Galaxy's centre

Nature volume 415, pages 128–129 (2002)Cite this article

For twenty years astronomers have wondered what is responsible for the X-ray emission from the centre of our Galaxy. New data from the sharpest X-ray eye around — the Chandra observatory — reveal all.

By the middle of the twentieth century astronomers knew that our Solar System was located far from the centre of the Milky Way — that broad swath of starlight you can see on a clear night. So what is at the centre of our Galaxy? The Milky Way is some 80,000 light years across and contains more than a hundred billion stars. Clouds of dust prevent optical astronomers from seeing the Galactic Centre, but infra red, radio and X-ray wavelengths are largely unaffected. Indeed, infrared observations have revealed that several million stars are located within a light year of the centre. Within this central region is a strong radio source that is thought to be a supermassive black hole marking the true heart of our Galaxy. On page 148 of this issue, Wang, Gotthelf and Lang1 report new observations from the Chandra X-ray observatory which provide the most detailed X-ray map yet of objects near the Galactic Centre.

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Figure 1: Computer illustration of an X-ray binary system.

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  1. Institute of Physics, University of Cologne, Zülpicher Strasse 7, Köln, 50937, Germany

    Andreas Eckart

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  1. Andreas Eckart
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Correspondence to Andreas Eckart.

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Eckart, A. X-rays reveal the Galaxy's centre. Nature 415, 128–129 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1038/415128a

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