Hubble’s High-Definition View of the Andromeda Galaxy
This is a little fragment of the largest NASA Hubble Space Telescope image ever assembled, a sweeping view of a portion of the Andromeda galaxy (M31). Though the galaxy is over 2 million light-years away, the Hubble telescope is powerful enough to resolve individual stars in a 61,000-light-year-long section of the galaxy’s pancake-shaped disk. It’s like photographing a beach and resolving individual grains of sand. And, there are lots of stars in this sweeping view — over 100 million, with some of them in thousands of star clusters seen embedded in the disk. Never before have astronomers been able to see individual stars over a major portion of an external spiral galaxy.
