the milky ways central molecular zone /

Published at 2016-02-29 14:08:04

Home / Categories / Astronomy / the milky ways central molecular zone
The center of our Milky Way galaxy lies about 27000 light-years absent in the direction of the constellation of Sagittarius. At its core is a black hole about four million solar masses in size. Around the black hole is a donut-shaped structure about eight light-years across that rings the inner volume of neutral gas and thousands of individual stars. Around that,stretching out to about 700 light-years, is a dense zone of activity called the Central Molecular Zone (CMZ). It contains nearly eighty percent of all the dense gas in the galaxy - a reservoir of tens of millions of solar masses of fabric - and hosts giant molecular clouds and massive star forming clusters of luminous stars, or among other regions many of which are poorly understood.

Source: phys.org

Warning: Unknown: write failed: No space left on device (28) in Unknown on line 0 Warning: Unknown: Failed to write session data (files). Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct (/tmp) in Unknown on line 0