A pair of space telescopes..well, just look at the pics

[The Straight Story]

Andromeda's once and future starsJohn Roach says: A pair of space telescopes is giving astronomers an unprecedented view of stellar birth and death in the Andromeda Galaxy, located about 2.5 million light-years away.

The combined image was made using data from the European Space Agency's Herschel and XMM-Newton observatories, which targeted the galaxy during Christmas 2010.

The space telescopes view the universe in wavelengths of light that are absorbed by Earth's atmosphere and thus unavailable to ground-based telescopes.

Herschel, which is sensitive to far infrared light, picks up the rings of star formation seen here as reddish circles filled with clouds of cool dust and gas. It is the most detailed image ever acquired of the galaxy in this wavelength, showing five concentric rings of star-forming dust, ESA reports in today's image advisory.




http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/01/05/5771179-andromedas-once-and-future-stars

[Quantess]

1. Cool!

[Peace Patriot]

2. I'm wondering about those straight lines that "fill in" the space between two of the rings

at about 4 o'clock in the central brown-gold image of Andromeda. I've been studying A LOT of galaxy images at www.galaxyzoo.org (a great project, by the way--for ordinary people to participate in), and I don't recall seeing anything remotely like that. It's a sort of cross-hatching pattern between the rings. The straight lines of stardust are angled in the direction of the spiral but are not yet curved and there is more such cross-hatching in other places, between rings.

Maybe, since this is a new photo (and a new type of photo), nobody yet knows what the cross-hatching is about. But if anybody has a clue, please post it.

One other question: Anybody know if Andromeda has a black hole in the middle (under that blue bubble)?

And thanks for posting these photos!

[Uncle Joe]

3. Those are most excellent pics.

Thanks for the thread, The Straight Story.