September 22, 2009--White dwarfs, newborn stars, and black holes crowd together in the violent pool of hot gases surrounding the core of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, in a new composite image from the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

The new picture, a mosaic of 88 images, reveals the complexity of interactions near the galaxy's central supermassive black hole. In the picture, for example, thousands of point-like x-ray sources are stars that are constantly having material pulled away by the gravity of dense, dead neighboring stars.