This NASA Hubble Space Telescope infrared mosaic image represents the sharpest survey of the Galactic Center to date.

You’re staring straight into the churning heart of our Milky Way galaxy, right through the “teapot” in the constellation Sagittarius, as revealed by infrared light and Mr Hubble’s Space Telescope. Click image for HST homepage. Image description below the fold.

At upper left, large arcs of ionized gas are resolved into arrays of intriguingly organized linear filaments indicating a critical role of the influence of locally strong magnetic fields. The lower left region shows pillars of gas sculpted by winds from hot massive stars in the Quintuplet cluster. At the center of the image, ionized gas surrounding the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy is confined to a bright spiral embedded within a circum-nuclear dusty inner-tube-shaped torus.