Neighbors

Dr. Robert Agnew (shown above sitting atop an ancient Mayan observatory in Mexico) is a Professor of Music and Humanities at Edison State College in Piqua, Ohio. Born in Youngstown, Ohio, Robert has a Masters Degree from Bowling Green State University and a Ph.D. from Michigan State University.

Neighbors

Of all the objects that can be seen with the naked eye in a dark sky location, the most distant is the Andromeda Galaxy, about 2.2 million light-years away.

It is, indeed, amazing that the light of that tiny puff of cloud, as it appeared to our ancestors before the advent of the telescope, left the galaxy such a long, long time ago. The Andromeda Galaxy is however, our next door galactic neighbor. By comparison, the most distant galaxy I’ve observed in a backyard telescope was NGC 4889 in the constellation Coma Berenices with an approximate distance of 300 million light-years - and the most distant galaxy professionally observed, with the aid of special cameras, is nearly 13 billion light-years distant.

The Andromeda Galaxy has long figured in science fiction - as well it should - since it is the closest galaxy to us of a size larger than our own Milky Way Galaxy. In fact, it holds about twice the mass as the Milky Way, containing approximately 300 billion stars, and it is around 130,000 light years from one tip of its spiral arm to the furthest tip of the opposite spiral arm. It takes its name from the constellation in which it is located in the sky: Andromeda.

Given the fact that most galaxies are moving away from us, it is interesting to note that the Andromeda Galaxy is moving toward our galaxy at nearly 200 miles per second. Our Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy will eventually collide, though if one does the math (don’t forget that light travels at 186,000 miles per second, and that the Andromeda Galaxy is 2.2 million light years away from us), it is obvious that it will not be a problem for Milky Way Galaxy dwellers (that’s us!) for quite some time.

Given a clear night at a dark sky sight, the Andromeda Galaxy is a feast for a small telescope or a good pair of binoculars. The longer one observes the Andromeda Galaxy, the more one can make out detail in its spiral arms. The galaxy also contains a number of interesting aspects. My journal entry for 10/28/2005 reads:

“Outside of seeing Mars in its closest approach for many years, perhaps the most interesting object of the evening was NGC 206, a Star Cloud in the Andromeda Galaxy (M31). It appears as a patch of nebula very close to a triangular asterism of stars. I was working from memory on its location though I knew that NGC 206 formed an isosceles triangle with the core of the Andromeda Galaxy and the nearby galaxy M32. I sketched what I saw, and was able to verify that I had, indeed, viewed the Star Cloud. Located in the southwestern spiral arm of the Andromeda Galaxy, I observed the Star Cloud at 106X and 136X. I got a fine look at it at both magnifications. It is a star forming region of the Andromeda Galaxy, only about 30 million years of age.”

The other galaxy mentioned in my journal entry, M32, is one of two small companion galaxies to the Andromeda Galaxy. The other one is M110. Visible in a small telescope, M32 is a Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy and M110 an Elliptical Galaxy. The three of them, as well as our Milky Way Galaxy, are part of the Local Group of Galaxies, containing nearly thirty systems, all of them neighbors, galactically speaking, of course!

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