Galactic centre. Coloured composite Chandra X-ray telescope image of the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way. The image is colour-coded to show the energy of radiation released in the region: red is low energy, green is medium and blue is high. Galactic centre lies around 25,000 light years from Earth. It contains a supermassive black hole (in bright white region, centre), with many white dwarves and neutron stars (coloured dots) formed by the gravitational collapse of stars. Very high temperature gases (around 10 million degrees Celsius) are released into the rest of the galaxy, enriched with elements released by star death.