# @nasa on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/CplboB5skU2
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/4636856-nasa-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/66250b0f24.jpg
- **Posted:** 2023-03-09T22:26:00.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** NASA (@NASA) — https://gondola.cc/NASA

## Caption

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 of the photo, giving way to a swirling mass of green, red, yellow, and white slashing horizontally across the middle of the image.⁣
⁣
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech⁣
⁣
#Space #MilkyWay #Galaxy #SpitzerSpaceTelescope #Astrophotography #BlackHole

## Stats

- **Views:** 0
- **Likes:** 1,343,273
- **Shares:** 0
- **Comments:** 2,387

## Tags

spitzerspacetelescope, astrophotography, space, milkyway, galaxy, blackhole

---
Copyright (c) Gondola