Our nearest neighbor Andromeda lies 2.5 million years away, yet we can still see it with the
naked eye here on Earth.
Have you ever wondered what’s going on in the galaxy next door?
Hey everyone Julia here for DNews
Andromeda gets its name from a beautiful princess in Greek mythology, whose name means ruler
of men.
Humankind has seen this fuzzy patch in the sky for centuries but no one was sure what
it was.
Until 1923 when Edwin Hubble figured out that it wasn’t just a cloud of dust in our galaxy
but a cluster of stars much, much further away.
At least ten times as far as the stars at the edges of our own galaxy.
This discovery rocked the world and changed our view of the universe forever.
We no longer thought that Milky Way was the entire universe.
Now we knew there could be hundreds, thousands, maybe millions more galaxies, just like our
own.
Since then we’ve learned a lot about our neighbor.
Scientists recently made a really cool discovery using the Hubble Space Telescope.
They discovered that Andromeda is surrounded by a giant ball of gas!
And I mean GIANT.
It nearly reaches halfway to the Milky Way!
That’s more than a million light years.
WHOA.
It’s so big that if you could see it with the naked eye its diameter would be 100 times
the size of the moon.
But the gas is dark, so sadly, we can’t see it.
Andromeda is a spiral galaxy.
It’s also known as Messier 31, M31, or NGC 224, and is bigger than the Milky Way.
It might be as wide as 220,000 light-years in diameter according to a paper published
in The Astrophysical Journal, while our own galaxy is about half that size.
It also contains a trillion stars while our small system only has a quarter to half a
billion.
Nearly 70% of those stars lie mostly in a thin disc which surrounds a bulge of older
stars near the galaxy’s core.
But a team of international researchers from UCLA and Cambridge University also found a
thick rotating disc of older stars and their path extends above and below the thinner disc.
Some researchers think these discs provide clues to how the galaxy formed.
Claire Dorman a grad study at UC Santa Cruz, found stars in Andromeda’s discs that moved
in two ways, ordered and disordered.
The disordered movement of some of the stars might suggest that Andromeda had a violent
past, colliding with and cannibalizing some smaller galaxies.
And Andromeda has a lot of smaller satellite galaxies swirling around its edges.
So far scientists have counted more than 20.
One of those galaxies, Andromeda II has some strange patterns of start movements that suggests
that we’re actually witnessing the end of a small galactic collision.
and oh yeah guys.
Speaking of collisions.
we’re gonna bang I mean.
Our galaxies.
The milky way and andromeda are set on a collision course.
Andromeda is speeding towards us at 250,000 miles per hour!
When they collide it won’t be an explosion of smashing stars.
The stars in each galaxy are too far apart to be a real threat to each other.
But they might get jostled up a bit.
One simulation suggests that our own solar system might wind up further away from the
core of the Milky Way.
But rest easy, it won’t happen for another four billion years.
While we're on the subject of space, have you wondered why everything in the universe
is spinning?
Trace explains in this video here.
Alright y’all, space is a big place!
And there’s still a lot to learn about it, what do you guys wanna know about the final
frontier?
Let us know down in the comments below.
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