Tour: A New Panorama of Our Galactic Center

A new panorama from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the MeerKAT radio telescope provides a stunning view of the center of our Milky Way galaxy. It also reveals threads of superheated gas and magnetic fields, which are weaving a tapestry of energy near the supermassive black hole that resides there. Over the course of its mission, Chandra has taken many observations of the Galactic Center. This latest expands Chandra’s high-energy view farther above and below the plane of the galaxy — that is, the disk where most of the galaxy’s stars reside — than previous imaging campaigns. In the image, we see X-rays with different energies from Chandra in different colors. These have been combined with radio data from MeerKAT, a radio telescope in South Africa. The result is intricate to the eye and also contains a wealth of scientific information to explore. For example, researchers identified long and narrow bands of X-rays that they call “threads“. These features are bound togeth