Astronomers Produce the Largest Image Ever Taken of the Heart of the Milky Way

Astronomers have captured the central region of our Milky Way in a striking new image, unveiling a complex network of filaments of cosmic gas in unprecedented detail. Obtained with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), this rich dataset—the largest ALMA image to date—will allow astronomers to probe the lives of stars in the most extreme region of our galaxy, next to the supermassive black hole at its center. The central region of our Milky Way, sometimes referred to as the "Bulge," remains something of an enigma to astronomers. Because it is densely packed with stars and clouds of dust and gas, capturing images of its interior has historically been very ... [4297 chars]