The Milky Way's X-Shaped Central Cloud of 10,000 Million Stars --New Revelations from the ESO Telescopes

Story on: TheDailyGalaxyNews

   One of the most important and massive parts of the galaxy is the X-shaped galactic bulge. This huge central cloud of about 10 000 million stars spans thousands of light-years, but its structure and origin were not well understood.
  
   Unfortunately, from our vantage point from within the galactic disc, the view of this central region — at about 27 000 light-years' distance — is heavily obscured by dense clouds of gas and dust. Astronomers can only obtain a good view of the bulge by observing longer wavelength light, such as infrared radiation, which can penetrate the dust clouds.

   The very wide-field view of the Milky Way above shows the extent of the new VISTA infrared image of the center of the galaxy. These data cover the region known as the bulge of the galaxy and have been used to study a much larger number of individual stars in the central parts of the Milky Way than ever before. The region covered by the new VISTA mosaic is shown as a rectangle.

   Earlier observations from the 2MASS infrared sky survey had already hinted that the bulge had a mysterious X-shaped structure. Now two groups of scientists have used new observations from several of ESO's telescopes to get a much clearer view of the bulge's structure.