Milky Way Galactic Center

Captured by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope back in 2009.  This is an image that approximates the location of the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy.  The image shows an enormous swirling vortex of hot gas that glows with infrared light.  It is a multiwavelength composite image and includes near-infrared light captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.  

In the image, colors represent different wavelengths of light. Hubble’s near-infrared observations are shown in yellow, revealing hundreds of thousands of stars, stellar nurseries, and heated gas. The deeper infrared observations of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope are shown in red, revealing even more stars and gas clouds. Light detected by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory is shown in blue and violet, indicating where gas is heated to millions of degrees by stellar explosions and by outflows from the supermassive black hole.