Downtown, cruising through the galaxy⁣ ⁣ Near the heart of our Milky Way galaxy, about 26,000 light-years from Earth, is a bustling downtown shown in infrared from our Spitzer Space Telescope. One hundred thousand light-years across, featuring at least 100 billion stars, our spiral galaxy is kept together by a supermassive black hole estimated to be four million times as massive as our Sun.⁣ ⁣ Crowds of millions of stars create a blue haze that coalesces toward the center of the image, where green features represent carbon-rich dust molecules illuminated by starlight swirling around the galaxy’s core, and young stars generate a thermal glow seen in the yellow-red color. The brightest section of the image shows the immense, densely populated central star cluster in our galaxy, which astronomers have determined closely orbits a massive black hole at the center of our galaxy.⁣ ⁣ Image description: Pinpricks of light dot the dark blue background as it fades to light blue toward the center ...