A new image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured a sweeping, high-definition panoramic view of the Andromeda galaxy (M31), as outlined in a press release. The image, the largest ever captured by the telescope, gives viewers a bird's-eye view of one portion of M31 and is the sharpest image taken of the galaxy yet. Although M31 is over 2 million light-years away, the technology utilized by the Hubble Space Telescope is powerful enough to snap photos of individual stars along the pancake-shaped disk of the galaxy's 61,000-light-year-long stretch.
The new image captures more than 100 million stars, some of them embedded in clusters of thousands in M31's disk, and is a new benchmark for space cartography that looks to capture high-definition images of the large spiral galaxies that dominate the universe. Before the release of the image, scientists had never been able to see individual stars inside an external spiral galaxy over such as wide space.
Hubble used 7,398 exposures of the galaxy taken over 411 individual pointings to create the fascinating panorama and, due to the fact that M31 is only 2.5 million light-years from Earth, it was a much bigger target than the other galaxies that Hubble typically photographs — some of them are billions of light-years away.
The large groups of young blue stars seen in the image mark the locations of star clusters and star-forming regions — they cluster towards the right side of the image in the blue, ring-like feature. Underneath the entire galaxy is an even distribution of red stars, which have lower temperatures than the blue ones, and trace M31's evolution over its billion-year existence.
NASA's exploration of our solar system is being conducted in order to better understand our universe and the galaxies, such as M31, that reside in it.
The findings are being presented at the 225th meeting of the Astronomical Society that is currently taking place in Seattle until Jan. 8.
