By clicking here you can zoom in on the image up to the scale of individual stars.
Experts from NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, have created a large-scale panorama of part of the Andromeda galaxy (M31), 48 thousand light-years wide, which is the most detailed and high-quality image of this galaxy, closest to us, to date. … In addition, this panorama is the largest ever image synthesized from images of the Hubble Space Telescope.
Despite the fact that the Andromeda galaxy is at a distance of 2.5 million light years from us, the capabilities of the Hubble telescope are enough to see individual stars of the galaxy, which is 61 thousand light years long. Such shooting is like shooting from a sufficiently large distance of the beach with the resolution to individual grains of sand. Only in this case, the role of grains of sand is played by stars, the number of which in the image is more than 100 million, grouped in thousands of star clusters included in the disk of the Andromeda galaxy.
Since the Andromeda galaxy is the closest galaxy to us, apart from our own galaxy, the Milky Way, it is a subject of increased interest to astronomers than the countless number of very distant galaxies that the Hubble telescope captures.
With stunning high resolution, this image is a kind of photographic map of Andromeda, which will be used by scientists in the study of large spiral galaxies, the dominant type of galaxies in the entire "galactic population" of the Universe, which number is approximately 100 billion. Previously, astronomers were unable to see every single star in such a vast image, and the new image is the first such image in which all the stars are represented in the context of their "home" galaxy.
The Hubble telescope traces densely packed regions of stars in the central part of the galaxy shown on the left side of the image. Moving from the bulge of the center of the galaxy, the survey passes through clusters of stars and gas and dust clouds towards the more "rarefied" outskirts of the galactic disk, where there are dense enough star clusters that form a kind of ring around the galaxy. In addition to stars, this ring also contains dense dust clusters, visible as dark and black spots, impervious to the light of the stars behind them. And the uniform glow of the entire galactic disk is provided by relatively "cold" old red stars, which can be used to trace all the features of the development of the galaxy as a whole for more than a billion years.