The Independent - London, July 17th, 1996
It may look like an elephant, but to astronomers this picture is actually the clearest yet taken of the heart of the Milky Way - and they say that it shows our galaxy has a bright future - for a few billion years, at least.
They also hope it will provide definitive data on just how many stars there really are in our galaxy - a number now estimated at 50 billion - and whether the mystery of "dark matter", thought to make up much of the content of the universe but never seen, has been solved.
The shape in the first picture - dubbed "the Mammoth" - shows an area near the core of our galaxy, 20,...
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