NASA shares stunning images of supermassive black hole, leaves netizens intrigued

NASA's Perseverance rover on Mars may be space enthusiasts' new hit attraction, but the space agency is not content with allowing the Red Planet hog all the attention.

The space agency recently shared deep space photos taken from Chandra X-Ray Observatory, showing an absolutely stunning look at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy, including a black hole millions of times the mass of our Sun.

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"The center of our Milky Way galaxy contains an exotic collection of objects, including clouds of gas in the millions of degrees, neutron stars & white dwarf stars tearing material from companion stars, and Sagittarius A* — a supermassive Black Hole weighing about 4 million times the mass of our Sun," the Chandra X-Ray Observatory's Instagram handle said.

"The region around Sagittarius A* is shown in this composite image with Chandra X-ray data (green and blue) combined with radio data (red) from the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa," the post said.

The imagery left netizens stunned, with users leaving comments like "I wanna live long enough to explore the universe," and "wish I could travel there for summer holidays." At least one user praised NASA for 'doing justice' to legendary Indian astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, after whom the Chandra X-Ray Observatory is named.

Chandra is one of NASA's so-called four "Great Observatories" alongside the Hubble Space Telescope, Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, and the Spitzer Space Telescope. Of the four, only Hubble and Chandra are still operational, while Compton deorbited in 2000, and Spitzer was deactivated in 2020.