Gaze up at the Sagittarius constellation, and you are looking at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. It may not look like much to the naked eye (especially if a bunch of space junk is blocking your view), but to the world's sharpest X-ray and radio telescopes, the archer hides a chaotic collage of black holes, exploding stars, magnetic fields and inexplicable bubbles of gas.
Now, using data from two such telescopes — NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa — researchers just pieced together the most comprehensive picture yet of our galaxy's center. The result is a glorious tangle of orange, green and purple X-ray emissions, intertwined with tendrils of ghostly gray radio signals.
This image is an "unprecedented" view of the galactic center, plus the mysterious structures towering above and below it, according to a statement from Chandra researchers.