Astronomers from the European Space Agency have shown a composite image of the Andromeda galaxy, which combines hundreds of photographs from the Hubble Space Telescope. It took more than 10 years to obtain the most detailed image of the nearest large galaxy, Live Science writes..
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The Andromeda Galaxy is our closest large spiral galaxy, much larger than the Milky Way.. It is the only large galaxy that can be seen with the naked eye. The Andromeda Galaxy is located at a distance of 2.5 million light years from us, which is quite close by cosmic standards.
Now this spiral galaxy is slowly approaching the Milky Way, and according to astronomers' forecasts, over the next 5 billion years it will crash into our galaxy. As a result of the collision and subsequent merger of two galaxies, a truly gigantic object will arise.
In order to create the new most detailed image of the Andromeda Galaxy, which consists of 2.5 billion pixels, it took the Hubble telescope more than 10 years and more than 1000 revolutions around the Earth. The image itself was created on the basis of 600 individual photographs and on it you can see approximately 200 million individual stars. During the observation, the Hubble telescope took separate images of the northern and southern parts of the Andromeda Galaxy.
In the image you can only see those stars that are much brighter than the Sun and in fact there are up to 1 trillion stars in the Andromeda Galaxy, which is about 10 times more than in the Milky Way.
New photo will allow astronomers to better understand the history of the evolution of the Andromeda galaxy. For example, it is believed to have collided several billion years ago with a large galaxy that is now the M32 dwarf elliptical galaxy and orbits the Andromeda galaxy. Such a collision led to the fact that the Andromeda galaxy took away most of the mass of M32, which led to the emergence of a large number of new stars in it.
Although the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy are believed to have appeared at approximately the same time and in the same region of space, they still have different developmental histories. The Andromeda Galaxy has many more young stars, suggesting it has collided with other galaxies more often.
Observations of the Andromeda Galaxy allow astronomers to better understand the processes that occur in the Milky Way, because it is also a spiral galaxy. It is difficult for scientists to observe our galaxy because we are located inside it.
100 years ago, astronomer Edwin Hubble first discovered that the so-called Andromeda nebula is actually a separate galaxy. Before this, astronomers believed all the stars they saw were in the Milky Way. Now it is known that there are more than 100 billion galaxies in the visible part of the Universe..
As Focus already wrote, the Chinese “artificial Sun” set a new record and obtaining limitless energy is one step closer. Chinese physicists managed to hold plasma in a thermonuclear reactor for more than 1000 seconds during the launch of thermonuclear fusion..
Focus also wrote that scientists have come to the conclusion that the first habitable planets were created in the Universe even before the first galaxies arose. It would seem impossible, but the authors of the study gave arguments in favor of their theory.