SOFIA Spots Recent Starbursts in The Milky Way Galaxy's Center

Jan. 08, 2013

J.D. Harrington
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-5241
j.d.harrington@nasa.gov

Nicholas A. Veronico
SOFIA Science Center
Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
650-604-4589
nveronico@sofia.usra.edu


RELEASE: 13-010

SOFIA SPOTS RECENT STARBURSTS IN THE MILKY WAY GALAXY'S CENTER

WASHINGTON -- Researchers using the Stratospheric Observatory for
Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) have captured new images of a ring of gas
and dust seven light-years in diameter surrounding the supermassive
black hole at the center of the Milky Way, and of a neighboring
cluster of extremely luminous young stars embedded in dust cocoons.

The images of our galaxy's circumlunar ring (CNR) and its neighboring
quintuplet cluster (QC) are the subjects of two posters presented
this week during the American Astronomical Society's meeting in Long
Beach, Calif. Ryan Lau of Cornell University and his collaborators
studied the CNR. Matt Hankins of the University of Central Arkansas
in Conway is lead author of the other paper, regarding the QC.
SOFIA is a highly modified Boeing 747SP aircraft carrying a telescope
with an effective diameter of 100 inches (2.54 meters) to altitudes
as high as 45,000 feet (13.7 kilometers).

The images were obtained during SOFIA flights in 2011 with the Faint
Object Infrared Camera for the SOFIA Telescope (FORCAST) instrument
built by a team with principal investigator Terry Herter of Cornell.

FORCAST offered astronomers the ability to see the CNR and QC regions
and other exotic cosmic features whose light is obscured by water
vapor in Earth's atmosphere and interstellar dust clouds in the
mid-plane of the Milky Way. Neither ground-based observatories on
tall mountain peaks nor NASA's orbiting Hubble and Spitzer space
telescopes can see them.
The images may be seen by visiting:

http://www.nasa.gov/sofia


or


http://www.sofia.usra.edu

Each image is a combination of multiple exposures at wavelengths of
20, 32, and 37 microns.

Figure 1a shows the CNR and Figure 2a shows the QC. The CNR and other
exotic features revealed by SOFIA's FORCAST camera are invisible to
Hubble's near-infrared camera, as shown for comparison in figures 1b
and 2b. Figure 3 shows the two fields studied in these papers as
square insets on a large-scale image of the galactic center made by
the Spitzer Space Telescope at a wavelength of 8 microns.

"The focus of our study has been to determine the structure of the
circumnuclear ring with the unprecedented precision possible with
SOFIA" said Lau. "Using these data we can learn about the processes
that accelerate and heat the ring."

The nucleus of the Milky Way is inhabited by a black hole with 4
million times the mass of the sun and is orbited by a large disk of
gas and dust. The ring seen in Figure 1a is the inner edge of that
disk. The galactic center also hosts several exceptionally large star
clusters containing some of the most luminous young stars in the
galaxy, one of which is the Quintuplet Cluster seen in Figure 2. The
combination of SOFIA's airborne telescope with the FORCAST camera
produced the sharpest images of those regions ever obtained at
mid-infrared wavelengths, allowing discernment of new clues about
what is happening near the central black hole.

"Something big happened in the Milky Way's center within the past 4
million to 6 million years which resulted in several bursts of star
formation, creating the Quintuplet Cluster, the Central Cluster, and
one other massive star cluster." said Hankins, lead author of the QC
paper. "Many other galaxies also have so-called 'starbursts' in their
central regions, some associated with central black holes, some not.
The Milky Way's center is much nearer than other galaxies, making it
easier for us to explore possible connections between the starbursts
and the black hole."

SOFIA Chief Scientific Advisor Eric Becklin, who is working with the
CNR group, determined the location of the galaxy's nucleus as a
graduate student in the 1960s by laboriously scanning a single-pixel
infrared detector to map the central region.

"The resolution and spatial coverage of these images is astounding,
showing what modern infrared detector arrays can do when flown on
SOFIA," Becklin said. "We hope to use these data to substantially
advance our understanding of the environment near a supermassive
black hole."

SOFIA is a joint project of NASA and the German Aerospace Center.
SOFIA is based and managed at NASA's Dryden Aircraft Operations
Facility in Palmdale, Calif. NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett
Field, Calif., manages the SOFIA science and mission operations in
cooperation with the Universities Space Research Association
headquartered in Columbia, Md., and the German SOFIA Institute at the
University of Stuttgart.

For information about SOFIA and its science mission, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/sofia


and


http://www.sofia.usra.edu


and

http://www.dsi.uni-stuttgart.de/index.en.html



and


http://www.dlr.de/en/sofia


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