A few weeks back, we reported the first image captured of the Andromeda Galaxy via the Subaru telescope’s new Hyper-Suprime Cam (HSC). New photos have since emerged, which demonstrate the powerful camera’s remarkable ability to capture highly detailed images of galaxies light years away.
A breakdown of what you’re looking at as per the official press release is as follows:
The first image shows the entire Andromeda Galaxy. The red box centers on a part of the galaxy's disk (second image) just above the center with young stars (blue) and hydrogen clouds (green) visible. The purple box focuses on a band of Andromeda (third image) in which a number of galaxies hundreds of millions of light years away can be seen in the background. The faint red stars scattered over the image are stars in the Milky Way, while the blue stars belong to Andromeda.
What’s particularly amazing about these photos is the fact that the Galaxy stretches 60,000 light years across, and yet the telescope is able to capture everything in a single image.
“We are very excited about using this survey to study the nature of galaxies in the distant past,” said Michael Strauss, a Princeton professor of astrophysical sciences who, with senior research scientist Robert Lupton and other scientists in Princeton's Department of Astrophysical Sciences, is involved in processing HSC images. “Because of the finite speed of light, we see these galaxies as they were billions of years ago, and we will compare the properties of galaxies in their youth to the mature galaxies we see around us today.”
The HSC includes within it 116 charge-coupled devices and a wide-field corrector containing seven high optical-quality lenses, all of which are housed in an innovative ceramic lens panel. Such a unique partnership between cutting-edge technologies is what allows the images to be so consistently sharp and highly detailed.
To produce these images, Princeton researchers are working with colleagues at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe in Japan on the software pipelines that analyze terabytes of raw data. This information is responsible not only for the beautiful images you see above, but also for providing exact measurements of the brightness, position, and shape of each galaxy and star.
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Story via: princeton.edu
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