NASA's destroyed Swift Observatory took one of the best-ever photos of bright Andromeda
While Swift likely won't be remembered best for shimmering starscapes like this one, it's a powerful reminder that looking at familiar structures in a new light can change everything.
Key points
- In visible-light images of Andromeda taken with ground-based telescopes, the galaxy's bright center bleaches out many of the fiery young stars that emerge in Swift's view.
- 4), NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory fell out of space, burning up in the sky over Sumatra.
- Designed to swivel toward deep-space explosions at a moment's notice, Swift excelled at capturing bright, fleeting and faraway specks of light.
How the Swift Observatory saw the gamma-ray burst GRB 221009A, which may be the most energetic emission of this kind ever seen.
One of its most significant detections was a gamma-ray burst — an incredibly bright blast, likely emitted by a giant star as it exploded in a supernova before collapsing into a black hole.
Additional details
- Beardmore (University of Leicester)) But Swift also took millions of observations of the nearby universe, including galaxies in our backyard.
- One of its most jaw-dropping images is this 24-hour exposure of the Andromeda galaxy (M31), located about 2.5 million light-years from Earth.
- It was a fitting, fiery end for a telescope that spent 22 years studying the most powerful explosions in the universe — and, even with Swift gone, its observations will continue to feed scientific curiosity for years to come.
- The multiwavelength observatory was equipped with optical, ultraviolet (UV) and X-ray instruments, allowing it to catch cosmic bursts of energy across the electromagnetic spectrum, zeroing in on flares of light that other telescopes might miss.
- These sources include thousands of dense, hot star clusters scattered across Andromeda's 150,000-light-year-wide ring, as well as the distant galaxy M32 (seen as a bright orb of light to the bottom right of Andromeda's center).
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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