Image of Milky Way's Center Credited to Daniel Wang and Team Featured in BBC’s ‘Sky at Night Magazine’
Content
A composite image of the Milky Way's center credited to Daniel Wang, a professor in the College of Natural Sciences's Department of Astronomy, and a team of fellow astronomers was recently featured in an article in BBC's Sky at Night Magazine. To create this image, the astronomers used radio data from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile and X-ray data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, a telescope launched aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia in 1999.
The article examines astronomers' long-held belief that the Milky Way's center is dominated by Sagittarius A*—a supermassive black hole containing roughly four million times the mass of the Sun—and how a new study proposes a provocative alternative: the Galactic Center may instead be a dense concentration of "fermionic dark matter" capable of producing the same gravitational effects observed in nearby stars and gas clouds.
Click here to view Daniel Wang and team's image of the Milky Way's center, and to learn more about this new study.