Hubble completes the largest galactic mosaic of all-time | by Ethan Siegel | Starts With A Bang! | Mar, 2025

MarylandDigitalNews.comSCIENCE

posted on Mar. 03, 2025 at 3:47 pm

This selection of the Andromeda galaxy comes courtesy of the largest photomosaic ever assembled with Hubble Space Telescope data. There’s an enormous wealth of astronomical data found within the image: far more than is readily visible to the human eye. (Credit: NASA, ESA, Benjamin F. Williams (UWashington), Zhuo Chen (UWashington), L. Clifton Johnson (Northwestern); Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI))

The full extent of the Andromeda galaxy, the nearest large galaxy to our own, has been entirely imaged with Hubble’s exquisite cameras.

Here in the Milky Way, our own galaxy’s structure remains obscure.

The European Space Agency’s space-based Gaia mission has mapped out the three-dimensional positions and locations of more than one billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy: the most of all-time. Looking toward the center of the Milky Way, Gaia reveals both light-blocking and luminous features that are scientifically and visually fascinating. Being confined to observing the Milky Way from within it, there are many features of our own galaxy that remain unknown. (Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC)

From within our home galaxy, even multiwavelength observations are limited.

This updated Radio/X-ray composite of the galactic center, featuring data from both MeerKAT and Chandra, showcases the new information that can be gleaned from stitching together multiple wavelengths of light. In the future, improved observations and superior observatories may help us solve the scientific mysteries of the origin of a variety of features within the Milky Way, including lobes, bubbles, and sprites. (Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/UMass/Q.D. Wang; Radio: NRF/SARAO/MeerKAT)

External galaxies, however, teach us many relevant lessons.

The spiral galaxy UGC 12158, with its arms, bar, and spurs, as well as its low, quiet rate of star formation and hint of a central bulge, may be the single most analogous galaxy for our Milky Way yet discovered. It is neither gravitationally interacting nor merging with any nearby neighbor galaxies, and so the star-formation occurring inside is driven primarily by the density waves occurring within the spiral arms in the galactic disk. (Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA)

The largest galaxy on the sky is Andromeda: 2.5 million light-years away.

This full-scale view of the Andromeda Galaxy, M31, showcases its star-forming regions lining its spiral arms, its dust lanes, and its central, gas-poor region. Unlike the Milky Way, Andromeda lacks a prominent central bar. This image is a fairly close approximation of what human eyes would see if they could make out these details in Andromeda. (Credit: Adam Evans/flickr)

Edwin Hubble observed individual stars within it in 1923, proving Andromeda’s…

MarylandDigitalNews.comMarch 3, 2025

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