Speeding star offers a rare glimpse of the Milky Way’s galactic centre
A map of the sky assembled using data from the Gaia space telescope, with the centre of the Milky Way in the middle of the image
ESA/Gaia/DPAC
Astronomers have had a rare glimpse into the heart of the Milky Way thanks to an errant star expelled from the galactic centre.
At the middle of our galaxy is a supermassive black hole, closely surrounded by a group of hundreds of stars. Slightly further out is a larger disc of stars, and further out still is an even larger star group, called the nuclear star cluster (NSC).
