Global warming, the Iraq war, economic woes, fears of terrorism and now, just when it appeared things couldn’t get any worse, astronomers predict the Sun and Earth along with it will be hurled into deep space when our galaxy collides with a neighboring galaxy.
The discovery of several large, metal-poor stars located far from the center of the Andromeda galaxy suggests our nearest galactic neighbor might be up to five times larger than previously thought.
01.02Moon Over Andromeda
The Great Spiral Galaxy in Andromeda (aka M31), a mere 2.5 million light-years distant, is the closest large spiral to our own Milky Way. Andromeda is visible to the unaided eye as a small, faint, fuzzy patch, but because its surface brightness is so low, casual sky gazers can’t appreciate the galaxy’s impressive extent in planet