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Imagine how long it would take to eat a candy cane that’s a thousand trillion miles tall! 😋

Scientists peering into the center of our Milky Way galaxy found this 190-light-year tall “candy cane,” but (sadly) it is not a peppermint treat. It does contain other goodies, though. They have found huge collections of material, called giant molecular clouds, where stars are being born. And there are magnetic fields that might be evidence of a bubble from an outburst in our galactic center long ago.

The full image shows our galaxy’s center in infrared (blue), radio (red) and microwave (“minty” green) light. The picture essentially color codes different ways light is produced. The blue and cyan regions show us cool dust where star formation has just begun. Yellow features show more-established star “factories.” Red reveals places where electrically charged gas interacts with magnetic fields.

This image includes newly published observations using an instrument designed and built at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, called the Goddard-IRAM Superconducting 2-Millimeter Observer (GISMO). It was used with a 30-meter radio telescope located on Pico Veleta, Spain, operated by the Institute for Radio Astronomy in the Millimeter Range headquartered in Grenoble, France. The image shows a region about 750 light-years wide.

Find out more about this image and what we can learn from studying star factories!

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