The Milky Way is packed with star clusters – thousands of them. They contain anywhere from a few dozen stars to more than a million. And the most impressive of them all is right in the middle – it surrounds the supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy.

The Nuclear Star Cluster contains up to 10 million stars. They extend a couple of dozen light-years from the black hole in every direction. But most of them are packed in close. If our part of the galaxy were that densely settled, we’d have a million stars closer to us than our current closest neighbor, Alpha Centauri. So any planets in the cluster would never see a dark night.

Most of the stars in the cluster formed about 10 billion years ago, when the galaxy was young. But there was another wave of starbirth about three billion years ago, and a smaller one just a hundred million years ago. Each wave might have been triggered when the Milky Way swallowed a smaller galaxy. As the galaxies merged, clouds of gas and dust settled in the middle, around the Milky Way’s black hole. That gave birth to new stars – populating the galaxy’s most impressive cluster.

The cluster is in Sagittarius, which is due south at nightfall. The constellation looks like a teapot. The center of the galaxy is in the “steam” rising from the spout. But giant clouds of dust absorb the light from the galaxy’s heart, so it takes special instruments to see the cluster.

Script by Damond Benningfield