NASA releases jaw-dropping 2.5 billion pixel image that took 10 years to capture

The Hubble Space Telescope has used its sensitive instruments to create a mosaic image containing 2.5 billion of the Milky Way's closest neighbor.

NASA releases jaw-dropping 2.5 billion pixel image that took 10 years to capture
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TL;DR: NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured a 2.5 billion-pixel image of the Andromeda galaxy, our closest neighbor, set to collide with the Milky Way in 4.5 billion years.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured a stunning panoramic view of the Milky Way's closest celestial neighbor, which is schedule to collide with our own galaxy in approximately 4.5 billion years.

The incredible image has been posted to NASA and the European Space Agency's (ESA) social channels as well as its website's where it's detailed the image is comprised of a ridiculous 2.5 billion pixels. For those that don't know, Andromeda is located approximately 2.5 million light-years away, and the image is actually a more than 10 year effort by the Hubble Space Telescope which snapped approximately 600 different fields of view of Andromeda.

Notably, the image shows the galaxy "almost edge-on," or tilted 77 degress relative to Earth's view. Because of our position Hubble was required to orbit Earth more than 1,000 times to gather the images required to piece this behemoth together.

NASA releases jaw-dropping 2.5 billion pixel image that took 10 years to capture 01

Representatives from the European Space Agency said it "was a herculean task" to gather the images and piece them together, but once complete, researchers have now created a record-breaking mosiac image of Andromeda, which contains a staggering 2.5 billion pixels. The image has captured 200 million stars, but researchers estimate Andromeda could as many as 1 trillion stars, which would mean it has 10 times the number of stars than our own Milky Way galaxy.

"Without Andromeda as a proxy for spiral galaxies in the universe at large, astronomers would know much less about the structure and evolution of our own Milky Way," the ESA representatives wrote

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NEWS SOURCE:livescience.com

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Jak joined the TweakTown team in 2017 and has since reviewed 100s of new tech products and kept us informed daily on the latest science, space, and artificial intelligence news. Jak's love for science, space, and technology, and, more specifically, PC gaming, began at 10 years old. It was the day his dad showed him how to play Age of Empires on an old Compaq PC. Ever since that day, Jak fell in love with games and the progression of the technology industry in all its forms.

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