Andromeda Galaxy PHAT Mosaic
This sweeping view of the Andromeda Galaxy covers a 61,000-light-year-long stretch of the galaxy's pancake-shaped disk. Though the galaxy is over 2 million light-years away, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is powerful enough to see over 100 million individual stars and thousands of star clusters. The complete, full resolution mosaic, with more than 2 billion pixels, is the largest Hubble image ever assembled.
The panorama is the product of the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT) program. This ambitious photographic cartography of Andromeda represents a new benchmark for precision studies of large spiral galaxies. This view shows the galaxy seen in blue and red filters as imaged with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys from July 2010 through October 2013.
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Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA, ESA, J. Dalcanton (University of Washington), the PHAT team, and R. Gendler
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Project support
- Frank Summers (STScI)
- Marit Jentoft-Nilsen (None)
Missions
This visualization is related to the following missions:Datasets used in this visualization
Note: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.
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ID: 30124 Hyperwall Visual
A Journey Into Andromeda
Read moreAndromeda galaxy–also called M31 by astronomers–is the largest galaxy in the Local Group, the group of galaxies that our Milky Way galaxy also belongs to. The Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury is a Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Multi-cycle program to map roughly a third of M31’s star forming disk, using 6 filters covering from the ultraviolet through the near infrared. With HST’s resolution and sensitivity, the disk of M31 will be resolved into more than 100 million stars, enabling a wide range of scientific endeavors.This movie starts with a 1.5 x 3.0 kiloparsec (KPC) view of part of Andromeda's major star forming ring. The field contains millions of stars, mottled by filaments of dust, which dim and redden the background stars. As the movie begins, it zooms into the region, revealing a rich mix of old red stars and young blue stars, along with occasional background galaxies and emission line nebulosity. As the movie pans across, it moves into regions of intense star formation, traced by thousands of bright blue stars.Satellite: Hubble Space Telescope ||
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