The Milky Way centre

The "galactic plane" as seen in different wavebands in the centre of our galaxy.

The top panel shows the Milky way in the infrared as recorded by the IRAS satellite. The galactic plane is clearly seen as a broad strip running through the middle of the picture. This infrared emission is mostly due to instellar dust warmed by absorbed starlight.

In the middle panel the optical image of the central part of our Galaxy as seen by the naked eye on clear nights. Most of the central part of the galaxy is hidden by the above mentioned interstellar dust. Most of this starlight is emitted by stars that are close to the solar system on the scale of the Milky way.

The bottom panel shows the new picture of the Milky Way as seen by HESS in very high energy gamma rays. Individual sources of this radiation can be clearly seen. The big bright source is the supernova remnant RX J1713.7-3946 recently reported by the HESS collaboration. It can be seen that most of the new sources of very high energy gamma rays cluster along the galactic plane. Image and text: HESS collaboration.

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