For a little perspective of our wonderful, amazing universe... NASA has just released the largest and sharpest photograph ever made of the Andromeda Galaxy, the nearest spiral galaxy to ours that contains an estimated 1 trillion stars. The new image (above is a crop showing a portion of it) weighs in at 1.5 gigapixels (i.e. 1.5 billion pixels); it’s so big that you would need 600HD televisions to display the entire digital photo. Captured by the Hubble telescope, the image reportedly shows over 100 million stars and thousands of star clusters. And keep in mind that this is just a 40,000 light year section of the whole spiral galaxy. This is what a tiny, tiny portion of the photo looks like when zoomed all the way in (the bright star is one of the smaller bright points in the zoomed out photo): For an easier way to experience the sheer scale of this image, check out this 4K video created by YouTube user daveachuk. He took the 4.3 gigabyte photo and created a video fly-through that will give you a jaw-dropping tour in about 3 minutes. Keep in mind that every little dot you see in this image is a star, and researchers have found that virtually ever star has at least one planet orbiting it. Many of those planets also have moons. And this is all found inside a single galaxy. According to the best estimates of astronomers there are at least one hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe. Theyve counted the galaxies in a particular region, and multiplied this up to estimate the number for the whole universe. https://youtube/watch?v=udAL48P5NJU&feature=youtu.be
Posted on: Thu, 08 Jan 2015 20:43:44 +0000
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