Astronomy Picture of the Day -- 100 Million Stars in the Andromeda Galaxy

NASA ^ | January 06, 2015 | (see photo credit)

[SunkenCiv]

Explanation: What stars compose the Andromeda galaxy? To better understand, a group of researchers studied the nearby spiral by composing the largest image ever taken with the Hubble Space Telescope. The result, called the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT), involved thousands of observations, hundreds of fields, spanned about a third of the galaxy, and resolved over 100 million stars. In the featured composite image, the central part of the galaxy is seen on the far left, while a blue spiral arm is prominent on the right. The brightest stars, scattered over the frame, are actually Milky Way foreground stars. The PHAT data is being analyzed to better understand where and how stars have formed in M31 in contrast to our Milky Way Galaxy, and to identify and characterize Andromeda's stellar clusters and obscuring dust.

[SunkenCiv]

[Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Dalcanton, B. F. Williams, L. C. Johnson (U. Washington), PHAT team, R. Gendler]

[SunkenCiv]

10000 pixels wide!

The Big One

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[VaRepublican]

So what yer sayin is that is about a third of it.

[9thLife]

That’s 10,000 stars per pixel.

[Flick Lives]

“Of all the class M planets, in all the galaxies, in all the universe, she walks into mine.”

[left that other site]

I am so glad that they used pinking shears so the edges of the universe won’t unravel.

That would be worse than Global warming, I think!

[Alas Babylon!]

The image they captured is 2.5 million light years away, meaning the photons from those stars took 2.5 million years to cross empty space and hit the telescope lenses that made the image.

Where were we 2.5 million years ago? Humans didn’t even exist!

Keep in mind that the Andromeda galaxy is in a fixture known as the “Local Group”, of which are own galaxy, the Milky Way, is part of. And the universe has billions of similar sized galaxies spread out for billions of light years! Just amazing!

[djf]

It’s visible now, I believe.

Beautiful!

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks for keeping us in stitches. /rimshot

[a fool in paradise]

That’s almost as many stars on Facebook.

[left that other site]

So it would seam! (badda bing!)

[null and void]

*ouch* cut it out!

[left that other site]

But these comments are tailor made for this THREAD!

[null and void]

Hmmmm. You’re right, I’m seeing the pattern.

[left that other site]

I hope I didn’t come across as snippy.

If I was, I will apologize and bolt right out of here! :-)

[mikrofon]

PHAT ‘n all dat, fo’ shizzle !

[mikrofon]

Some other plausible explanations for the image format:

– The view is an artist’s conception of the galactic core from a planet on the outer rim of Andromeda with a fractal mountainous landscape.

– Since we’re looking at a scene millions of years into the past, the image was captured as the Langoliers were consuming the space-time…

[left that other site]

Both very plausible Theiries!

I have been looking at the earlier photo for so long that the new one was quite startling without the black corner! :-)

[left that other site]

Oh My! “Theiries = Theories”

Why didn’t I catch that?

[mikrofon]

Always on the lookout for new backgrounds, I cropped out & resized the monstrous image to generate one that does look like an exotic planetary view ;-)