Image Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Dalcanton, B.F. Williams, and L.C. Johnson (U. of Washington), the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT) team, and R. Gendler
美國航空太空總署（NASA）在2015年1月6日公布一張由哈伯望遠鏡拍攝的高解析仙女座星系一部分的相片。該星系距離地球約2百萬光年，威力強大的哈伯太空望遠鏡卻能將淺碟狀星系綿延61000光年長的某一部份拍得非常細緻，超過1億顆星球在這個剖面上，那就像用相機拍攝一片海灘，而能細細分辨出每一粒砂一樣。
您若要看高解析原檔，請點：https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/hs-2015-02-a-hires_jpg.jpg
Hubble’s High-Definition Panoramic View of the Andromeda Galaxy
The largest NASA Hubble Space Telescope image ever assembled, this sweeping bird’s-eye view of a portion of the Andromeda galaxy (M31) is the sharpest large composite image ever taken of our galactic next-door neighbor. Though the galaxy is over 2 million light-years away, the Hubble Space Telescope is powerful enough to resolve individual stars in a 61,000-light-year-long stretch 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. This ambitious photographic cartography of the Andromeda galaxy represents a new benchmark for precision studies of large spiral galaxies that dominate the universe’s population of over 100 billion galaxies. Never before have astronomers been able to see individual stars inside an external spiral galaxy over such a large contiguous area. Most of the stars in the universe live inside such majestic star cities, and this is the first data that reveal populations of stars in context to their home galaxy. The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., in Washington. > More: Hubble’s High-Definition Panoramic View of the Andromeda Galaxy Image.
