TOKYO: A new image from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) XMM-Newton X-ray ‘scope gives a nice view of the wild party at the Milky Way’s “tumultuous heart”.
The snap spans around one thousand light-years and was compiled from all XMM-Newton probes of the area, “adding up to about one and a half months of monitoring in total”, the ESA explained.
It shows “young stars and stellar clusters, and some of these are visible as white or red sources sprinkled throughout the image”.
There are also “bright, point-like sources” – binary stellar systems in which one of the exhausted stars has become a neutron star or black hole. The ESA elaborated: “Because of their high densities, these compact remnants devour mass from their companion star, heating the material up and causing it to shine brightly in X-rays.”
