A new study using data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has found that the nearby Andromeda galaxy has been forming fewer new stars over the past 500 million years.

Researchers also discovered that the decline has become much steeper during the last 40 million years, offering fresh insights into the life cycle of galaxies similar to the Milky Way, reported NASA.

The findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal. To reach the conclusion, researchers combined data from two Hubble surveys, the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury and the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Southern Treasury.

Together, the surveys mapped about two-thirds of Andromeda's disk in high detail. The team studied around 200 million individual stars to build a detailed picture of the galaxy's history.

Ben Williams, an astronomer at the University of Washington and co-author of the study, said researchers need to measure individual stars because they are the fossil record of a galaxy's formation. He added that Hubble is the only telescope that provides enough spatial resolution across a large area to make such observations in Andromeda.

The researchers divided the galaxy into thousands of sections, each covering about 300 light-years, to trace the history of star formation.

Source:Ndtv