Picture of the Month 

April 2004

The central regions of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, as seen by INTEGRAL in gamma rays. With its superior ability to see faint details, INTEGRAL reveals the individual sources that comprised the foggy, soft gamma-ray background seen by previous observatories. The brightest 91 objects seen in this image were classified by INTEGRAL as individual sources, while the others appear too faint to be properly characterized at this stage. All the details about resolving the soft gamma-ray background into discrete source can be found in a Nature-paper by Lebrun and co-authors (Nature, Vol 428, p293 2004).

Credits: F. Lebrun (CEA-Saclay), ESA.

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