Star Formation Rate in Andromeda Over Time

This movie, created from an analysis of data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, demonstrates how the rate of star formation in the Andromeda galaxy has declined over the past 500 million years. Brighter colors indicate where star formation was highest during a given time.

Researchers combined two Hubble surveys that together imaged about two-thirds of the disk of Andromeda. They divided the image into thousands of squares 300 light-years on a side and determined the history of star formation within each parcel. They found that star formation has been steadily declining.

The animation begins with the Hubble image of Andromeda for context before fading to the team’s data and stepping through time from 500 million years ago to the present day. In order to create a smoother video, different spans of time were averaged together to better show the overall trend.

The region around the center of the Andromeda galaxy is black because there are so many stars that the researchers couldn’t analyze that area. The galactic center is marked with an ‘X’ at the beginning of the video.