The Andromeda Galaxy is the Milky Way Galaxy’s closest neighbor; with it being around 2.5 million lightyears away from Earth. It was once referred to as the Great Andromeda Nebula in older readings. It gets its name from the Andromeda constellation which in turn received its name from the Greek goddess Andromeda. The Andromeda Galaxy being 220,000 light years across is the biggest of its local galaxy group which includes the Milky Way Galaxy, Triangulum Galaxy, and about 44 smaller galaxies. The Andromeda Galaxy contains about (1 trillion*10to the 12th power) stars, which is more then double the estimated 200- 400 billion stars located in our own Milky Way Galaxy. Along with this the Andromeda Galaxy has a brightness magnitude of 3.4 making it one of the brightest of all the Messier Object group. …show more content…
Comparing this galaxy’s size to are own Milky Way Galaxy, which is estimated to be around 8.5*1011 solar masses large, the Andromeda Galaxy is about 20% bigger then are own. Along with this we also know that both our own galaxy and this galaxy are on a collision course. It is estimated that in around 7.5 billion years that these two galaxies will merge together in a surely violent process. It is suspected that after this a large disc or elliptical galaxy will exist in the place of the once separate galaxies. The first reference to the Andromeda Galaxy was around 964 by the Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sulfi in his Book of Fixed Stars in which he described it as like a little cloud. After this the first description of the Andromeda Galaxy through a telescope was by a German Astronomer by the name of Simon Marius on December15, 1612. After this Charles Messier catalogued the Andromeda Galaxy in M31 in the year of 1764 which made people incorrectly give credit to Messier for the discovery of this galaxy although it was visible to the naked
In the book, The Andromeda Strain there is a problem that faces mankind. This problem is a strange virus that comes to Earth from an unmanned satellite, which was in space. This satellite crashes into a small town in Arizona, which has a population of 38 people.
Messier 8, nicknamed the Lagoon Nebula is an interstellar cloud located in Sagittarius, discovered by John Flamsteed in 1680. It is one of the few nebulae that can be seen by the naked eye. It was given its nickname by Agnes
BookRags and Gale's For Students Series. "The Andromeda Strain Study Guide and Notes." Bookrags.com. Thomson Gale, 2006. Web. 6 June 2012.
Many of the heavenly bodies were considered to be the representations of deities. The master of reason, Aristotle, stated once long ago that everything was made of only five elements the final being what makes up the heavenly bodies, after all they lacked the proper technologies to know differently. It was Galileo in 1610, using his telescope, that found dark spots on the sun. So as technological innovations occur our understanding of physics and astronomy grow. Newton in 1687 discovered the laws of gravity, suggested that all the solar and stellar bodies operated the same.
Two men named Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis has a debate in 1920 that is still important today for changing how we think about galaxies. They talked about five important things. The first thing they debated was how big our galaxy, the Milky Way, is. Shapley said that the Milky Way was much bigger than we first thought, 100,000 light-years across, and that, because it was that big, it had to be the only one. Curtis said the the Milky Way was smaller than that, and that other galaxies existed past ours. They were both right and both wrong. Shapley was right about the size of the Milky Way, and Curtis was right about there being many more galaxies in the universe.
The Andromeda Strain: A Critical Analysis In 1969 Michael Crichton wrote The Andromeda Strain, a book that would forever expand the limits of a science fiction novel. Although written in 1969, it deals with very current issues facing the modern day boilogical and even political realm. Technically a science fiction novel, the meticulously crafted plot is so intertwined with actual science and technology that some have catagorized it as "science fact. " It is this realistic overtone that gives the impression that perhaps, someday, events in the book could actually take place. Plot Synopsis The book opens up with a fictional page of acknowledgments stating "This book recounts the five-day history of a major American scientific crisis."
Waller, William H. The Milky Way: An Insider's Guide. Princeton, N.J: Princeton UP, 2013. 42+. Print.
Hubble, Edwin. 1929, "A Relation between Distance and Radial Velocity among Extra-Galactic Nebulae" Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Volume 15, Issue 3, pp. 168-173
Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there lived a princess. Her name was Princess Leia. Growing up, she didn’t realize that one day, she and her twin brother would be travelling through space, fighting the dark side, fighting their father. This is Star Wars, the epic battle between good and evil. This is a very iconic movie series, one of the best sci-fi there is! Although, that is my opinion, I have a feeling many people would agree with me. As we take a look inside the film series, you’ll see a picture of what might be out there, and we have George Lucas to thank for that!
The Orion Nebula is a spectacular sight. Consequently, it has been a preferred target of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) over recent years. The HST has provided a great deal of insight into the complicated process of star formation. In June of 1994, C.
By 1936, astronomers had realized that the hazy balls they sometimes saw in their telescopes, which looked like stars obscured by gas, were actually galaxies (Hibbison).
The Hubble Telescope is the world’s first space-based optical telescope. The Hubble telescope received its name from American astronomer Dr. Edwin P. Hubble. Dr. Hubble confirmed an ever expanding universe which provided the basic foundation of the Big Bang theory. The first concept of the Hubble telescope came from Lyman Spitzer in 1946 who at that time was a professor and researcher at Yale University, Professor Spitzer believed that Earth’s atmosphere blurs and distorts light and a space orbited telescope would be able to surpass this problem. He spent nearly all of his life dedicated to making this concept into a reality. (http://hubblesite.org/the_telescope/hubble_essentials/)
The first person to ever observe the Milky Way was Greek philosopher, Democritus, who said the galaxy may consist of distant stars. In 1610, Galileo Galilei used a telescope to study the Milky Way and came to the conclusion that it was composed of billions and billions of faint stars. Then, in 1750, Thomas Wright c...
Astronomers believe that most galaxies consist of a supermassive black hole at the center, which attracts all constituents of galaxies such as, dust, gases (mainly Hydrogen and Helium), atoms, stars, interstellar clouds and planets to the center by force of gravity, but are not sure whether all galaxies contain a black hole in the center. Galaxies keep moving in relative motion to one another and intermittently can come so close that the force of gravitational attraction between the galaxies may become strong enough to cause a change in the shape of the galaxies, while in exceptional cases, the galaxies may collide. If two galaxies collide, they may pass right through without any effect or may merge, forming strands of stars, extending beyond 100,000 light years in space (World Book Online Reference Centre, 2005). Hence, neighboring and often other colliding galaxies induce the sha...
Where did astronomy originate? According to the Department of Astronomy, the earliest people to keep astronomical records where the Akkadians (they lived in what is later known as the northern part of Babylon). The earliest date is from around 2,500 B.C. The ancient Akkadian priests were the first to record these astronomical records. They recorded these records because it helped them predict some of the Sun’s motions, and the Earth’s moons, and the stars. These records included observations of the daily, monthly, and yearly positions of the stars and planets. These records explained the geographical locations of the planets. The records also helped with them being able to judge when to plant and harvest crops and with religious ceremonies.