A new image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured a sweeping, high-definition panoramic view of the Andromeda galaxy (M31), as outlined in a press release. The image, the largest ever captured by the telescope, gives viewers a bird's-eye view of one portion of M31 and is the sharpest image taken of the galaxy yet. Although M31 is over 2 million light-years away, the technology utilized by the Hubble Space Telescope is powerful enough to snap photos of individual stars along the pancake-shaped disk of the galaxy's 61,000-light-year-long stretch.
The new image captures more than 100 million stars, some of them embedded in clusters of thousands in M31's disk, and is a new benchmark for space cartography that looks to capture high-definition images of the large spiral galaxies that dominate the universe. Before the release of the image, scientists had never been able to see individual stars inside an external spiral galaxy over such as wide space.
