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Arthur T Knackerbracket [soylentnews.org] writes:

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story [techspot.com]:

The stunning panorama features over 600 overlapping Hubble images that have been painstaking stitched together. Spread across 2.5 billion pixels, you'll find some 200 million stars – all of which are brighter than our own Sun. That is a huge number, yet only a fraction of the estimated one trillion stars in the Andromeda galaxy. Many of Andromeda's less massive stars are beyond Hubble's sensitivity limit and thus, are not represented in the imaged.

Data from two surveys – the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT [nasa.gov]) program and the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Southern Treasury (PHAST [iop.org]) program – was used to construct the mosaic.

With it, astronomers will be able to learn more about the age of Andromeda as well as its heavy-element abundance and the stellar masses inside of it. The surveys will also help astronomers understand how Andromeda might have merged with other galaxies in its past.

"Andromeda's a train wreck. It looks like it has been through some kind of event that caused it to form a lot of stars and then just shut down," said Daniel Weisz at the University of California, Berkeley.

"This was probably due to a collision with another galaxy in the neighborhood."

NASA has multiple sizes of the panoramic available for download, including the full-size 203 MB [nasa.gov] image (42,208 x 9,870) and a more user friendly 9 MB variant [nasa.gov] (10,552 x 2,468).

Hubble has been in orbit for more than three decades, and continues to provide astronomers with meaningful science data. That said, NASA already has its successor waiting in the wings.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope [nasa.gov], scheduled to launch by May 2027, will feature a mirror roughly the same size as the one Hubble uses but will be able to capture much higher resolution images. A single Roman exposure will capture the equivalent of at least 100 high-resolution Hubble snaps, according to NASA.

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