Milky Way

StarDate

The hazy band of the Milky Way arches high across the sky on these mid-summer nights. At nightfall, it stretches from almost due north, high across the east, to almost due south. And it arcs high overhead by midnight. But you need to get away from city lights to see it.

The Milky Way is the combined light of millions of stars in the disk of our home galaxy. The galaxy’s busy core is in the teapot-shaped constellation Sagittarius, which is low in the southern sky at nightfall. We can’t actually see the core because it’s hidden behind clouds of dust, which form dark lanes within the Milky Way.

Astronomers use special instruments to peer through this dust. The instruments reveal some remarkable sights, including clusters of some of the hottest, brightest stars in the entire galaxy.

Two of the clusters are the Arches and the Quintuplet. Their stars probably formed just a few million years ago. Big clouds of gas and dust rammed together, triggering an intense bout of starbirth.

Many of the stars in these clusters are among the most massive in the galaxy. The heaviest is the Pistol Star. It’s probably more than a hundred times the mass of the Sun.

The cores of these massive stars are extremely hot, so the stars burn through their nuclear fuel in a hurry. Within a few million years, they’ll blast themselves to bits in titanic explosions. Even then, they’ll likely remain hidden from human eyes behind the cosmic haze.

Script by Damond Benningfield