You've never seen the neighboring galaxy Andromeda in such detail

NEWS CENTER Photo: NASA

Creation Date: June 30, 2025 17:36

The Milky Way is impossible to view from the outside with today's technology, so scientists are focusing on its closest counterpart, Andromeda. Located about 2.5 million light-years away, this spiral galaxy is filled with stars, gas and mysterious dark matter, just like the Milky Way.

According to Popsci, the new images released by NASA were created by combining data from the world's most powerful telescopes, including the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton telescope, and optical data from a number of amateur astrophotographers. The images cover visible, infrared, ultraviolet, radio, and X-ray wavelengths, and provide a lifelike portrait of the galaxy.

Thanks to the X-ray data provided by Chandra, high-energy radiation emitted from the supermassive black hole at the center of Andromeda and smaller dense objects scattered throughout the galaxy can also be observed.

Beyond visuals, NASA experts combined science and art by converting this data into sound. In this process, different wavelengths were converted into notes in order of frequency (X-ray, ultraviolet, optical, infrared and radio). The brightness determined the loudness of the sound, and the wavelength determined the pitch of the note. The result was a melodic, almost imaginary sound of a galaxy 152 thousand light years across.

Scientists hope that this new data could help us better understand Andromeda and, in particular, solve the mystery of dark matter, which was discovered in the 1960s thanks to observations of Andromeda by astronomer Vera Rubin.

NASA aims to take these studies further with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, scheduled to launch in 2027.