The Galactic Core

The innermost 100 light years or so of the Galactic core in X-rays. Click on the image to see the explanation at Astronomy Picture of the Day.

From the orbiting Chandra X-ray observatory: your tax dollars at work.

That's just amazingly cool detail. Just for reference, the disk of our Galaxy appears to be about 100,000 light years across, and the Sun appears to be in the disk about 25,000 light years from the core, which is rather densely packed with stars and gas. So I think that the image is about a quarter of a degree across; that makes it about a quarter of the area of the full moon on the sky.

The core is, in visible light, shrouded from view. I suppose that this image is what Superman would see from earth if he looked at the Galactic core.