Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
Explanation: What wonders lie at the center of our Galaxy? In Jules Verne 's science fiction classic A Journey to the Center of the Earth , Professor Liedenbrock and his fellow explorers encounter many strange and exciting wonders. Astronomers already know of some of the bizarre objects that exist at our Galactic center , including like vast cosmic dust clouds , bright star clusters , swirling rings of gas , and even a supermassive black hole . Much of the Galactic Center is shielded from our view in visible light by the intervening dust and gas, but it can be explored using other forms of electromagnetic radiation . The featured video is actually a digital zoom into the Milky Way's center which starts by utilizing visible light images from the Digitized Sky Survey . As the movie proceeds, the light shown shifts to dust-penetrating infrared and highlights gas clouds that were recently discovered in 2013 to be falling toward central black hole. In 2018 May, observations of a star passing near the Milky Way's central black hole showed, for the first time , a gravitational redshift of the star's light -- as expected from Einstein's general relativity . Web designed by Simon G. Kupisz, 2020
