The andromeda galaxy is dash galaxy

This famous spiral galaxy in the constellation of Andromeda is located approximately 2.5 million light-years away from us. Under a perfectly clear and dark sky, it can just be visible to the unaided eye. The Andromeda Galaxy is the largest member of the Local Group of galaxies, with one million million stars contained within a 220,000 light-year-wide disc, greatly exceeding the number of stars in our Milky Way. It is the nearest spiral galaxy to our own and has become the most studied “external” galaxy so far. On 19 August 1885, the only recorded supernova in the Andromeda Galaxy took place when a star, now known as S Andromedae, destroyed itself in a convulsive explosion. About 14 dwarf galaxies orbit Andromeda, making it a very busy neighbourhood. The Andromeda Galaxy is approaching our Milky Way at the speed of about 400,000 kilometres per hour, and in about 2–3 billion years, the galaxies will pass through one another, although gravitational interactions will alter the appearance of both galaxies dramatically. The astronomer Edwin Hubble was the first to find Cepheid variable stars on astronomical photos of the Andromeda Galaxy, which enabled him to measure the distance to the galaxy. His measurements demonstrated that the Andromeda Galaxy was not a cluster of stars and gas within our Milky Way, but an entirely separate galaxy located at a significant distance from our own. The Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi first mentioned the Andromeda Galaxy in AD 964 in h...

Stars and galaxies move around us at a pace that seemsglacial on human time scales. Their dance is exceedingly gradual, taking place over billions of years. But if we could see time the same way the stars do, the neighborhood around our Milky Way Galaxy would appear surprisingly active. Galaxies swing around one another, slowly spiraling together until they merge. Many don’t travel alone but bring companions with them, in a dark collision that may tear some stars from the heart of their homes and splay them across the sky. Other regions grow rich in gas and dust and begin, in their newfound opulence, to birth new stars. The dance of the galaxies is slow and violent, filled with both life and death. The Milky Way drives the motion of the collection of more than 100 galaxies known as the Local Group. Within that group, only the Andromeda Galaxy is larger than the Milky Way — roughly 125 percent more massive — and like our galaxy, it has a spiral shape. Two smaller galaxies stand out: the Triangulum Galaxy, dancing around Andromeda, and the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), orbiting the Milky Way. The rest of the neighborhood is filled mostly with satellites of the pair, smaller galaxies hovering like adoring fans. These galaxies flit about, but eventually will meld with their larger companions. When that happens, it will not be the first time our galaxy has bumped into another. Ancient artifacts The Milky Way suffered its first major collision early in its lifetime, roughly 10 b...

If you look toward the constellation Andromeda on a clear night far from city lights, you can barely make out a long, fuzzy blob called the Andromeda Galaxy. The Andromeda Galaxy, or M31, is the nearest large neighbor of our Milky Way, though it sits some 2.5 million light-years away. That makes it the most distant object regularly visible with the naked eye. By some estimates, the Andromeda Galaxy contains roughly one trillion stars. And it stretches more than 200,000 light-years in diameter. That’s significantly bigger than the Milky Way, which more recent estimates suggest is 150,000 light-years across (though the exact boundary of where either of these galaxies “end” is a bit nebulous). Astronomers are still struggling to get an accurate count, but our galaxy also appears to have roughly a quarter to a half as many stars as Andromeda. The Andromeda Galaxy’s discovery Ancient skygazers have probably pondered the nature of this blurry spot for many thousands of years. However, the oldest known discovery of the Andromeda Galaxy dates to 964 A.D., when a Persian astronomer named Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi wrote a book about “Fixed Stars.” In it, he called out Andromeda, and also noted the position of the But it wasn’t until the 1800s that astronomers started realizing just how special Andromeda was. That’s because until roughly a century ago, scientists thought our Milky Way was the entire universe. For some time, observers using their telescopes to hunt comets had been turning...