European Southern Observatory issues photo of the Milky Way’s central region

A handout photo made available by the European Southern Observatory, ESO, on 16 December 2019, taken with the HAWK-I instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in the Chilean Atacama Desert, showing the Milky Way’s central region with an angular resolution of 0.2 arcseconds.

This means the level of detail picked up by HAWK-I is roughly equivalent to seeing a football (soccer ball) in Zurich from Munich, where ESO’s headquarters are located. The image combines observations in three different wavelength bands.

The team used the broadband filters J (centred at 1250 nanometres, in blue), H (centred at 1635 nanometres, in green), and Ks (centred at 2150 nanometres, in red), to cover the near infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum. By observing in this range of wavelengths, HAWK-I can peer through the dust, allowing it to see certain stars in the central region of our galaxy that would otherwise be hidden.

Via EPA-EFE/European Southern Observatory