74 ASTRONOMY • MAY 2020
BREAKTHROUGH
DIVING DEEP INTO THE MILKY WAY’S HEART
On the next clear summer evening, gaze through binoculars toward the center of our galaxy. Under a dark sky, you’ll see
countless stars interspersed with dark dust lanes. But what would the scene look like without the obscuring dust? The
answer appears above. Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) lifted the veil by viewing the Milky Way
at near-infrared wavelengths, which penetrate all but the thickest dust clouds. The researchers captured more than 3 million
stars in their survey of the galactic nucleus using the HAWK-I instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. The image
achieves a resolution of 0.2 arcsecond, equivalent to seeing a quarter from 16 miles (25 kilometers) away! ESO/NOGUERAS-LARA ET AL.