The most detailed image of the Andromeda Galaxy, set to collide with the Milky Way, has been captured (photo).

Astronomers from the European Space Agency have unveiled a composite image of the Andromeda galaxy, which combines hundreds of photographs taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. It took over 10 years to produce the most detailed image of our nearest large galaxy, as reported by Live Science.

The Andromeda galaxy is the closest large spiral galaxy to us and is significantly larger than the Milky Way. It is the only large galaxy visible to the naked eye. The Andromeda galaxy is located about 2.5 million light-years away from us, which is relatively close in cosmic terms.

Currently, this spiral galaxy is slowly moving toward the Milky Way, and according to astronomers' predictions, it will collide with our galaxy within the next 5 billion years. The collision and subsequent merging of the two galaxies will result in a truly gigantic object.

To create the new most detailed image of the Andromeda galaxy, which consists of 2.5 billion pixels, the Hubble telescope required over 10 years and more than 1,000 orbits around Earth. The image is composed of 600 individual photographs and shows approximately 200 million distinct stars. During the observation, the Hubble telescope captured images of both the northern and southern parts of the Andromeda galaxy.

The image only reveals stars that are significantly brighter than the Sun, whereas the Andromeda galaxy is believed to contain up to 1 trillion stars, which is about ten times more than in the Milky Way.

The new photograph will help astronomers gain a better understanding of the evolutionary history of the Andromeda galaxy. For instance, it is believed that it collided several billion years ago with a large galaxy, which is now the dwarf elliptical galaxy M32 and orbits around the Andromeda galaxy. This kind of collision resulted in the Andromeda galaxy acquiring a large portion of M32's mass, leading to the formation of a significant number of new stars.

Although the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy are thought to have formed around the same time and in the same region of space, they have distinct developmental histories. The Andromeda galaxy has many more young stars, indicating that it has experienced more frequent encounters with other galaxies.

Observations of the Andromeda galaxy allow astronomers to better understand the processes occurring in the Milky Way, as it is also a spiral galaxy. Scientists find it challenging to observe our galaxy because we are located within it.

100 years ago, astronomer Edwin Hubble first discovered that the so-called Andromeda Nebula is actually a separate galaxy. Before this, astronomers believed that all the stars they observed were part of the Milky Way. Now it is known that there are more than 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe.