Moving closer to the center, the picture gets more complex and difficult to disentangle. This last source is extremely compact, and is almost certainly due to the central black hole itself. This is complicated structure in the ionized gas. The view is about 50 in longitude along the Galactic equator. The IR emission is primarily due to dust warmed by the surrounding starlight.
North is up.
Radio image at 20cm showing the large scale filaments which are probably due to synchrotron emission along magnetic field lines. Most of these stars are very young and massive and heavily reddened so they don't appear blue. Spectroscopic studies indicate that the stars are luminous super giants and only a few 10s of millions years old. 13.1 Central Black Hole Stars can be seen at the center of the Galaxy, very close to the center. In recent years even the bending of their orbits around the central massive source has been detected, by a team at MPI in Garching led by R. Genzel.