Birth and death within Andromeda – WBNews

This picture, released to the BBC, combines the power of Europe’s Herschel and XMM-Newton space telescopes. Herschel is sensitive to infrared light and sees the cold clouds of gas and dust where stars are forming. XMM-Newton, on the other hand, sees X-rays, a signature of the violent cosmos and the death throes of stars. We’ve never seen galaxies [in the infrared] with such high resolution as this beforeDr Jacopo Fritz, Ghent University Acquired in just the past few weeks, the joint observation from the two European Space Agency (Esa) telescopes has been featured on the BBC’s Stargazing Live series. Andromeda is something of a twin to our own Galaxy, the Milky Way. It is part of the Local Group and is a mere 2.5 million light-years distant. Like the Milky Way, it is also a spiral galaxy. Studying Andromeda is therefore seen as an excellent way to unravel some of the mysteries of our own stellar neighbourhood; and using Herschel and XMM-Newton in combination makes for a powerful probe. Herschel is Europe’s new flagship space observatory. The billion-euro mission was launched in 2009 and carries a 3.5m-diameter mirror, the biggest ever sent into space. Image caption A similar Herschel and XMM combination has been made of the famous Whirlpool Galaxy Its goal is to study the processes at play in the formation of stars and the evolution of galaxies. Its detectors can pick up the light coming from the frigid clouds of gas and dust that are being warmed by…more detail