The Sun is the closest star to us at the center of the Solar System. It is a huge, hot, glowing sphere of plasma that provides light and heat to the Earth we live on, but it is special to us. The Milky Way galaxy is made up of hundreds of billions of stars, and the Sun is one of them. Our solar system is located on the inner edge of a giant spiral arm, and like all neighboring stars and their orbiting planets, we gallop through space, orbiting the center of the Milky Way, a strange region known as the center of the Milky Way.
The Milky Way got its name because in ancient times, observers thought it appeared to be a galactic band of light, a cosmic path across the night sky. But if we could see this galaxy from above, it would look like a giant glowing spiral, about 100,000 light-years wide. Our solar system is located on the orthopedic arm of the constellation Orion, about 26,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way. If you could fly at the same speed as The Voyager One --- humanity's most distant man-made object, your journey would take more than 450 million years. From its best position, the center of the Milky Way is in the direction of sagittarius, where there are millions of bizarre objects, all concentrated in an area of about 20,000 light-years. This bright cosmic body surrounds the center of the Milky Way, blending with the glow of a straight-rod star, connecting the inner regions with the galaxy's magnificent spiral arms.
However, from Earth, because it hides behind huge clouds of dust and gas that can be found everywhere in the Milky Way, it is not easy to spot this bright region, similar to what we see when we gaze at the Andromeda galaxy. You can think of it as interstellar smoke that filters out visible light from distant regions and blurs our vision. Because of this, it was not until the mid-20th century that astronomers determined the true location of this center. But it wasn't until the advent of infrared telescopes that we were able to see what this bizarre region really looked like. Under the influence of infrared light, the dust or smoke that blocks our view becomes almost transparent and gradually disappears, revealing the wonder of the chaotic heart of our galaxy. Spectacular panoramic infrared images, such as this one from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, capture some of the grand structures and objects in the active area.
Spanning a width of 890 light-years, the Milky Way encompasses hundreds of celestial bodies that rotate around the axis. Massive objects are red, but those that are ancient and cryogenic look like a blue dot.
Emission nebulae, reflective nebulae, and dark nebulae are all observable, and they are the cradle of many stars, surrounded by many huge and mysterious dust fragments from the Milky Way's celestial bodies. By combining this image with the data collected by other telescopes, we can get a sharper image.
This composite infrared image combines more detailed color information provided to us by the Spitzer telescope, Sophia and Herschel Observatory. The image range spans 600 light-years, and it reveals phenomena such as the formation of huge curves by circular arch clusters.
In our galaxy, the Round Arch Cluster is the most densely known star, and the Quintuplet Cluster is home to the brightest and most massive pistol star we know of in the Milky Way. But it's not just the infrared that detects the obscured area. Other wavelengths such as X-rays and radio also give us a different picture of the complete galactic center.
This color image from the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Mongoose RADIO Telescope shows us the magnetic field lines produced by high-temperature gases and the complex energies produced by their interweaving. In addition to this masterpiece of the universe, X-rays or features represent a source of energy in neutron stars to black holes, and even companion stars torn apart by white dwarfs.
But the most interesting feature is in the galactic center, where any bright energy and matter is hidden, because at the heart of the galaxy there is a monster - Sagittarius A*, a black hole with supermassive mass. This black hole is an object with its own supermassive mass, and even under the influence of its own gravity, even light cannot escape. We can't observe this mysterious object directly, but powerful telescopes can observe objects orbiting the black hole. Under certain conditions, gravity has an effect on surrounding objects.
This stunning delayed photograph shows a star just a few light days away orbiting this supermassive black hole for more than 26 years. Its speed has been accelerated to show that these huge stars are moving around this dark object, and the star closest to the black hole is moving at 3% of the speed of light.
By tracking the orbits of these fast-moving stars, astronomers can determine the mass of this supermassive black hole at the center, and they found that the mass of this black hole is about 4 million times that of the Sun, and all of this mass is crowded in an orbit smaller than Mercury.
Although compared to supermassive black holes in other galaxies, Sagittarius A* is indeed a very massive black hole. But the study found that it is actually a relatively quiet, sleeping "giant", only when it devours the surrounding objects, occasionally accompanied by X-ray and infrared bursts of combustion. As we know, the silver heart is a chaotic and unfit place for life, filled with radiation from stars and material shredded by the strong gravitational pull of Angios A*.
But if we could complete this currently seemingly impossible journey, standing on a barren planet in this peculiar region, the nightly sky would be lit up by a beautiful sight of burning, and we could see stars that might be a million times denser than the sights we are familiar with on Earth. The closest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, is about 4 light-years away. But the stars here are too concentrated, and they are only a few light-weeks apart.
The night sky here is so bright that if life had found a way to survive near the silver core, they might never have learned about places outside the universe. With the imminent launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, a new exploration of the silver core by human beings using infrared light has begun to emerge. This brand-new space observatory will have the ability to see through the dusty mysteries of this puzzling realm and reveal the mysteries of the silver heart in unprecedented detail, taking the highest quality photographs that humans have ever obtained in this area. The only question is, what kind of miracle will we find this time? I really hope you enjoy this video. If you do, give me a thumbs up and subscribe to me (if you haven't already done so)! Thank you so much for watching! If you want to learn more about the excitement in the universe, remember to check out my other videos. We'll see you next time!
Proxima Centauri is a small and massive star located 4.2465 light-years away from the Sun ( 1.3020 parsecs ) south of the constellation of Centaurus. Its Latin name means "sagittarius nearest star". Discovered by Robert Innis in 1915 , Proxima Centauri is the closest known star to the Sun. Because its apparent magnitude at rest is 11.13, its brightness is relatively weak, so it cannot be directly seen by the naked eye. Proxima Centauri is a member of the Alpha Centauri Galaxy and is thought to be a component of Alpha C Centauri. It is located 2.18° southwest of alpha Centauri AB, a binary star system, and is currently 12,950 astronomical units (0.2 light-years) from the South Gate binary, and it takes about 550,000 years to orbit along this orbit.
by:Uyuni, Yu An, pikapika, ~~~~