The sharpest large composite image ever taken of our closest galactic neighbour, the Andromeda Galaxy, has been released by US space agency NASA.
The largest NASA Hubble Space Telescope image ever assembled, the bird’s-eye view shows a portion of the Andromeda galaxy (M31) and features over 100 million stars spanning 48,000 light years.
The image is comprised of 1.5 billion pixels – hundreds of thousands of time more than images captured by most digital cameras. It took three years for the Hubble survey to assemble together a mosaic image using 7,398 exposures taken over 411 individual pointings.
The images were obtained from viewing the galaxy in near-ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared wavelengths.
NASA said this “ambitious photographic cartography of the Andromeda galaxy represents a new benchmark for precision studies of large spiral galaxies that dominate the universe’s population of over 100 billion galaxies.
“It is like photographing a beach and resolving individual grains of sand. And there are lots of stars in this sweeping view – over 100 million, with some of them in thousands of star clusters seen embedded in the disk.”
The panorama is the product of the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT) program and was presented earlier this month at the 225th meeting of the US Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington.
The Andromeda Galaxy sits roughly 2.5 million light years away from Earth. However, scientists predict that in roughly four billion years, the Andromeda and our own Milky Way galaxies would collide to create a much larger body.
