Bill
2005-05-31 08:21:59 UTC
Can it be coincidence that this happend just as the series ended. I think not.
Bill
_____________________________
Andromeda galaxy larger than thought-astronomers
Mon May 30, 4:34 PM ET
The Andromeda galaxy just got bigger -- three times bigger, astronomers said
on Monday.
The galaxy is not actually expanding. But new measurements suggest that the
nearest galaxy to our own Milky Way is three times broader than astronomers
had thought.
They now believe a thin sprinkling of stars once thought to be a halo is in
fact part of Andromeda's main disk.
That makes the spiral galaxy, so close to Earth that it appeared as a fuzzy
blob to the ancients, more than 220,000 light-years across -- triple the
previous estimate of 70,000 to 80,000 light-years.
It appears that the outer fringes of the disk were made when smaller galaxies
slammed together, they told a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in
Minneapolis.
The structure is too bumpy to have been formed otherwise, said Rodrigo Ibata
of the Observatoire Astronomique de Strasbourg in France.
"This giant disk discovery will be very hard to reconcile with computer
simulations of forming galaxies. You just don't get giant rotating disks from
the accretion of small galaxy fragments," Ibata said in a statement.
Ibata, Scott Chapman of the California Institute of Technology and colleagues
in Britain and Australia worked together using observations from the Keck II
telescope in Hawaii.
They studied the motions of about 3,000 stars thought to be a mere halo and
not an actual part of the galaxy's disk.
But they are in fact sited in the plane of the Andromeda disk itself and move
at a velocity that suggests they are in orbit around the center of the galaxy,
Ibata's team said.
Andromeda is 2 million light-years from Earth. A light-year is the distance
light travels in a year -- about 6 trillion miles.
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K1TE&.#EA`0`!`( ``/___P```"'Y! $`````+ `````!``$```("1 $`.P``
`
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K1TE&.#EA`0`!`( ``/___P```"'Y! $`````+ `````!``$```("1 $`.P``
`
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K1TE&.#EA`0`!`( ``/___P```"'Y! $`````+ `````!``$```("1 $`.P``
`
end
Bill
_____________________________
Andromeda galaxy larger than thought-astronomers
Mon May 30, 4:34 PM ET
The Andromeda galaxy just got bigger -- three times bigger, astronomers said
on Monday.
The galaxy is not actually expanding. But new measurements suggest that the
nearest galaxy to our own Milky Way is three times broader than astronomers
had thought.
They now believe a thin sprinkling of stars once thought to be a halo is in
fact part of Andromeda's main disk.
That makes the spiral galaxy, so close to Earth that it appeared as a fuzzy
blob to the ancients, more than 220,000 light-years across -- triple the
previous estimate of 70,000 to 80,000 light-years.
It appears that the outer fringes of the disk were made when smaller galaxies
slammed together, they told a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in
Minneapolis.
The structure is too bumpy to have been formed otherwise, said Rodrigo Ibata
of the Observatoire Astronomique de Strasbourg in France.
"This giant disk discovery will be very hard to reconcile with computer
simulations of forming galaxies. You just don't get giant rotating disks from
the accretion of small galaxy fragments," Ibata said in a statement.
Ibata, Scott Chapman of the California Institute of Technology and colleagues
in Britain and Australia worked together using observations from the Keck II
telescope in Hawaii.
They studied the motions of about 3,000 stars thought to be a mere halo and
not an actual part of the galaxy's disk.
But they are in fact sited in the plane of the Andromeda disk itself and move
at a velocity that suggests they are in orbit around the center of the galaxy,
Ibata's team said.
Andromeda is 2 million light-years from Earth. A light-year is the distance
light travels in a year -- about 6 trillion miles.
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K1TE&.#EA`0`!`( ``/___P```"'Y! $`````+ `````!``$```("1 $`.P``
`
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K1TE&.#EA`0`!`( ``/___P```"'Y! $`````+ `````!``$```("1 $`.P``
`
end
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K1TE&.#EA`0`!`( ``/___P```"'Y! $`````+ `````!``$```("1 $`.P``
`
end