The most sensitive and comprehensive ultraviolet image ever taken of the Andromeda Galaxy, our nearest large neighbor galaxy, has been captured by NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer. The image is one of several being released to the public as part of the mission’s first collection of pictures. "The Andromeda image gives us a snapshot of the most recent star formation episode," said Dr. Christopher Martin, Galaxy Evolution Explorer principal investigator and an astrophysics professor at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, which leads the mission. “By studying this view of the galaxy in the process of forming stars, we can better understand how that fundamental process works, such as where stars form, how fast and why.” The image of Andromeda, the most distant object the naked eye can see, is a mosaic of nine images taken in September and October of 2003. It combines two ultraviolet colors, one near ultraviolet (red) and one far ultraviolet (blue). For comparison, a second image shows the Andromeda Galaxy, also called Messier 31, in visible light. Both images, along with other new pictures from the Galaxy Evolution Explorer, are available online at http://www.galex.caltech.edu and http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/GALEX . The new collection of images also includes views of several nearby galaxies; Stephan's Quintet of Galaxies; an all-sky survey image of the globular star cluster M2; and a deep image of the sky in the constellation Bootes. The Galaxy Evolution Explorer team is also releasing the first batch of scientific data, so the science community can propose additional observations for the mission. These images and data display the power of the Galaxy Evolution Explorer to collect sensitive ultraviolet images of large parts of the sky. "It’s very rewarding and exciting for the team to see the fruits of their labors," said Kerry Erickson, the mission’s project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “Because people are accustomed to seeing objects in visible light, it’s amazing to see how different the universe looks in ultraviolet and how much information is revealed to us by those observations.”
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