Core of the galaxy in high-res.[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Astronomers have produced the sharpest infrared portrait of the central 300 light-year-span of the Milky Way, showing details as small as 20 times the length of the solar system. The false-color composite combines images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope Hubble Space Telescope (HST), the first large optical orbiting observatory. Built from 1978 to 1990 at a cost of $1.5 billion, the HST (named for astronomer E. P. Hubble) was expected to provide the clearest view yet obtained of the universe. and the Spitzer Space Telescope Spitzer Space Telescope: see infrared astronomy; observatory, orbiting. of this turbulent region, which houses a supermassive black hole and lies 26,000 light-years from Earth. The image shows that most of the massive stars are widely distributed across the galaxy's center rather than confined to the core's three known massive-star clusters, as previously thought. The massive stars could constitute a new stellar class, says Q. Daniel Wang of the University of Massachusetts Amherst US News and World Report's 2008 edition of America's Best Colleges ranked UMass Amherst as one of the top 100 universities in the nation, placing it at #96, and ranking it the joint 46th amongst Public Universities. , whose team unveiled the portrait January 5 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society The American Astronomical Society (AAS, sometimes pronounced "double-A-S") is a US society of professional astronomers and other interested individuals, headquartered in Washington, DC. . |
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