From February 2005, ESA’s Integral gamma-ray observatory began to regularly monitor the centre of our Galaxy, and its immediate environment, known as the Galactic bulge.

This movie is composed of the sequence of individual observations performed about every three days from February 2005 to April 2006, during the Galactic bulge monitoring by the IBIS/ISGRI instrument on board Integral.

According to the Integral observations in April 2006, the high-energy rays from a handful of sources closest to the galactic centre, most of which are X-ray binaries, all faded temporarily.

The fortuitous dimming allows astronomers to set new limits on how faint these X-ray binaries can become. It also allows a number of new investigations to be undertaken with the data.

The movie covers a sky area of 5.3x4.1 degrees, centred on the Galactic Centre. In this version of the movie a few frames have been removed to facilitate the download. The complete (high-resolution) version can be obtained by clicking here .