Credit: IBIS Survey Team
Galaxy of the Dead
Stay safe wandering down the brightly lit alleys of the Milky Way. Glowing clouds of gas, warm dust, stars merrily burning away. What could be more innocent? But reality is something different, and much more bizarre. The glowing Milky Way is really a charnel house, full of corpses of the ancient dead and newly deceased. These are largely invisible to humans. Special instruments like the INTEGRAL observatory provide a "sixth sense" extending human sight into a non-human high energy domain. In this range the dead are quite apparent. The image above (from the INTEGRAL observatory) shows the dead of the Milky Way, glowing ghostly in the blackness: X-ray emitting stars, pulsars screaming in the darkness, neutron stars and introverted black holes completely wrapped up in themselves.
Published: November 03, 2008
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Page Author: Dr. Michael F. Corcoran
Last modified Friday, 20-Apr-2012 15:25:29 EDT