Some 30,000 light-years away near the chaotic, gaseous region
near our galactic center, a team of Japanese researchers has
found the strange cosmic feature you see above: a helical
molecular cloud twisting across some 60 light years. The
European Southern Observatory’s VISTA survey telescope has
turned its eyes inward to the center of our galaxy, and for the
first time has looked straight through it. VISTA’s latest batch
of infrared images have discovered two new globular clusters
here in the Milky Way that had never been seen before, but more
importantly they are the first star clusters that we’ve been
able to image beyond the dusty and gaseous core of our galaxy.
Behold, your galactic center. This Hubble image, captured with
the space telescope’s Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object
Spectrometer (NICMOS), is the highest-resolution pic of the
Milky Way’s galactic center taken to date, taking in a newly
discovered group of massive stars, lots of super-hot gas, and
roughly 35,000 square light years of space i