Hubble image archive

Galactic Bulge

Date: Jan 1, 2020
Mission: Hubble Space Telescope
Archive ID: hubblesite-images-2020-56-4762-image

By Kakha Giorgashvili January 1, 2020

This photo looking toward the center of the Milky Way galaxy covers 0.5 by 0.25 degrees on the sky (an area about twice as wide as the full Moon) and contains over 180,000 stars. The image captures a portion of our galaxy about 220 by 110 light-years across. It was taken with the Dark Energy Camera on the Victor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at the Cerro-Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of NSF's NOIRLab.

By studying the brightnesses of these stars at different wavelengths of light, astronomers were able to determine how many heavy elements they contain, which is related to their formation history. The team concluded that the majority of stars in our galaxy’s central bulge were formed in a single burst of star formation some 10 billion years ago.

Credits

CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/STScI, W. Clarkson (UM-Dearborn), C. Johnson (STScI), and M. Rich (UCLA)

Image Details

About The Object
Object Name	Milky Way
Object Description	Stars in the Galactic Bulge
R.A. Position	17:58:57.92
Dec. Position	-29:12:11.35
Distance	About 25,000 light-years from Earth
Dimensions	30 arcminutes across (about 220 light-years)
About The Data
Instrument	CTIO Blanco DECam
Filters	F485W, F635W, F925W
About The Image
Color Info	These images are a composite of separate exposures acquired by the DECam instrument on the Blanco 4-meter telescope. Several filters were used to sample specific wavelength ranges. The color results from assigning different hues (colors) to each monochromatic (grayscale) image associated with an individual filter. In this case, the assigned colors are: blue: F485W green: F635W red: F925W