'Herculean' 2.5-billion-pixel mosaic shows our closest galactic neighbor like never before — and took more than a decade to create
Taking over a decade to capture the breathtaking picture.
The European Space Agency's (ESA) map of the spiral galaxy is made up of around 600 distinct fields of view, offering a viewpoint that is "almost edge-on", or 77 degrees away from how we usually see it from Earth.
To achieve this, scientists conducted two separate observational projects, each monitoring the north and south regions of the galaxy independently. "It was a colossal undertaking" that entailed Hubble making over 1,000 orbits around our planet, according to ESA officials.
The mosaic is comprised of approximately 2.5 billion individual pixels – a new record for an image of Andromeda. This level of unprecedented detail has allowed researchers to distinguish over 200 million stars in the image, which appear akin to "grains of sand on a beach" as you zoom in on different areas.
, according to ESA.
Related: The Milky Way Galaxy may be just a tiny part of a significantly bigger group of celestial bodies, forcing us to reconsider our comprehension of the universe.
The latest picture will allow scientists in the UK to gain a clearer understanding of Andromeda's history. Experts believe that the galaxy collided with one of its current satellite galaxies, Messier 32, in the distant past. As a result, a considerable number of Messier 32's stars are now part of Andromeda. Examining how the different stars within Andromeda are distributed may allow them to learn more about this collision.
In the next 5-10 billion years
(Note: The original text is too short to paraphrase, only a time frame was given, so the paraphrased text is just the same as the original)
Hubble and Andromeda
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within the entire cosmos.
It has provided us with a wealth of knowledge about our galaxy and has greatly aided our understanding of it.
"A galaxy like Andromeda, serving as a proxy for spiral galaxies in the universe as a whole, significantly broadens our understanding of the structure and evolution of our own Milky Way," ESA representatives stated.
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