An international team of astronomers has created a vast, zoomable image of some nine billion pixels showing more than 84 million stars in the central ‘bulge’ of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. The image is so large that, if printed at the resolution of a picture in an ordinary book it would be 9 metres wide and 7 metres high. Click on the picture to see the image zoomed in

Photograph: handout/Reuters

Our picture desk’s selection of the best news images of the day:

A mesmerising photo illustration provided by Nasa shows the sky at night just before the predicted merger between our own Milky Way galaxy and neighbouring Andromeda. Offering a glimpse into the future, the view is inspired by computer modelling of the collision about 4bn years from now - a merger that will form a single galaxy in about 6bn years