PORTFOLIO Red Sky at Night 1/4

About the images

Clouds of dust in the Milky Way obscure almost all visible and UV light coming from our galaxy’s center, where nurseries of young stars cocoon themselves. In the absence of visible light, astronomers rely on other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum—such as low-frequency radio, infrared emissions, and X-rays—to study this region. At the center of this star nest is a supermassive black hole, which scientists discovered when they observed stars being pulled around a mass more than 4 million times heavier than our Sun.