Stars and Dust Through Baade's Window
Billions of stars light up the direction toward the
center of our Galaxy.
The vast majority of these stars are themselves
billions of years old, rivaling their home
Milky Way Galaxy
in raw age.
These stars are much more faint and red than the occasional young blue stars that light up most galaxies.
Together with interstellar dust,
these old stars make a yellowish starscape, as
pictured above.
Although the
opaque dust obscures the
true Galactic center in
visible light, a relative hole in the
dust occurs on the right of the image.
This region, named
Baade's Window for an
astronomer who studied it, is
used to inspect
distant stars and to determine the
internal geometry of the Milky Way.
Baade's Window
occurs toward the constellation of
Sagittarius.