Want to travel to the centre of the Milky Way? Ok, we’ll understand if not, at 100,000 light-year across it would take an insufferably long time, even if you took the mere 27,000 light years journey from Earth. Fortunately, ESA and NASA have stitched together images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope that takes on the interstellar journey in a matter of seconds.
Starting at the edge of our galaxy, the video zooms in to Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre four million times the mass of our Sun. It’s not just the black hole you’ll have to avoid when you get there though, the region has the equivalent of one million stars crammed into the same volume as there is between our Sun and its closest neighbour, Alpha Centauri.
But that’s enough astronomy for now, just sit back and enjoy the in-flight entertainment:
© Risinger/Guisard/ ESO/Hubble, Music: Johan B. Monell
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Authors
Alexander is the former Online Editor at BBC Science Focus.
