Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

Stunning view of Andromeda – 2.5 million light years away – captured by super telescope

Trevor Mogg
By
stunning view of andromeda captured
Image used with permission by copyright holder

If we know where in the night sky to look, we can see Andromeda – the nearest spiral galaxy to our own – with the naked eye. However, being 2.5 million light years away, it’s hardly surprising that it only appears as a faint smudge of light. And while powerful telescopes have, in recent years, brought the galaxy much closer, none have produced the level of detail or width of view achieved by Japan’s Subaru super telescope. Together with a three-ton 870-megapixel camera – the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) – the telescope has helped to capture a remarkable ultra-high-resolution image of this distant galaxy.

“The combination of a large mirror (8.2 meters), a wide field of view (1.5 degrees), and sharp imaging represents a giant step into a new era of observational astronomy and will contribute to answering questions about the nature of dark energy and matter,” the team operating the telescope, which is located on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea volcano, said on its website this week.

Recommended Videos

The first recorded sighting of Andromeda, also known as M31, was made by Persian astronomer al-Sufi in 964 AD. Astronomers have come to learn that Andromeda is similar in many ways to our own Milky Way Galaxy and therefore could provide answers as to how ours formed.

Related

“This first image from HSC is truly exciting,” said Dr. Masahiro Takada, chair of the HSC science working group. “We can now start the long-awaited, largest-ever galaxy survey for understanding the evolutionary history and fate of the expanding Universe.”

He’s talking about an ambitious “cosmic census” project involving “a large-scale imaging survey of every galaxy over a wide solid angle in the sky and in sufficient depth to probe the distant Universe.”

The census will compile detailed measurements of hundreds of millions of galaxy shapes and give scientists the opportunity “to map the distribution of dark matter, constrain the nature of dark energy, and search for baby galaxies that were just born in the early universe.”

To view the 6000 x 5957 image of Andromeda taken with the help of the Subaru telescope, click here. And yes, it’ll take a little while to download.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Trevor Mogg
Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
Junk from the ISS fell on a house in the U.S., NASA confirms
The International Space Station.

A regular stanchion (left) and the one recovered from the NASA flight support equipment used to mount International Space Station batteries on a cargo pallet. The recovered stanchion survived reentry through Earth’s atmosphere on March 8, 2024, and impacted a home in Florida. NASA

When Alejandro Otero’s son called him on March 8 to say that something had crashed through the roof of their home, he initially thought it might have been a meteorite.

Read more
Starliner spacecraft just took a major step toward first crewed flight
Boeing's Starliner spacecraft being stacked on the Atlas V rocket.

A crane lifts the Starliner spacecraft to the top of an Atlas V rocket. Boeing Space

Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft has been stacked atop the United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket ahead of its first crewed flight next month.

Read more
NASA needs a new approach for its challenging Mars Sample Return mission
An illustration of NASA's Sample Return Lander shows it tossing a rocket in the air like a toy from the surface of Mars.

NASA has shared an update on its beleaguered Mars Sample Return mission, admitting that its previous plan was too ambitious and announcing that it will now be looking for new ideas to make the mission happen. The idea is to send a mission to collect samples from the surface of Mars and return them to Earth for study. It's been a long-term goal of planetary science researchers, but one that is proving costly and difficult to put into practice.

The Perseverance rover has already collected and sealed a number of samples of Mars rock as it journeys around the Jezero Crater, and has left these samples in a sample cache ready to be collected.  However, getting them back to Earth in the previous plan required sending a vehicle to Mars, getting it to land on the surface, sending out another rover to collect the samples and bring them back, launching a rocket from the planet's surface (something which has never been done before), and then having this rocket rendezvous with another spacecraft to carry them back to Earth. That level of complexity was just too much to be feasible within a reasonable budget, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced this week.

Read more