Andromeda Galexy & The Milky Way

       In class we did a lab I which we plotted the observed radial velocity and angular distance from center of the Andromeda Galaxy Rotational Lab. The Adromeda galaxy (Aka M31) is a system of billions of stars. The distance is 2.5 million light years making it the nearest spiral galaxy. What I love about the studies of these cosmic neighbours can help us to understand the process of our own galaxy. I was reading a really cool article from 2006 talking about how a new radio frequency map of the Andromeda galaxy was made by a German-French research team of the Max Planck Institute de radioastronomie Millimetrique (IRAM) in Grenoble. This is interesting because the map shows the first detailed distribution of cold gas in a neighboring galaxy, revealing the sites where new stars are born. Mind you this article is from 2006 but that is very interesting because it was never done before. They also obtained the motions of this gas. There is more than 800 hours of telescope time for this study which at the time made it one of the most extensive observational projects in millimetre radio astronomy.

Here is the link to the Article - http://www.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de/public/pr/pr-m31-en.html

        In our galaxy, the Milky Way, studies of the distributions of carbon monoxide have been carried out for a long time. Astronomers find enough cold gas for star formation during millions of years to come. The thing I find so interesting about Astronomy is that although we have so much research and data in the field there are still so many unanswered questions and discoveries to be made. One unanswered question is how did this raw material of molecular gas come to exist in the first place?

        Something that confused me was the number of stars in the Milky way Galaxy, some sources say that the Milky Way consists of 100 billion stars others say that the MASS of our galaxy is roughly 100 billion times the mass of the sun, I will answer my questions in the next blog. On a personal note I think that the wonders of the galaxy are so fascinating, to think how small we are in comparison to the universe is amazing. So many people look up at the stars and think that they are just little things shinning in the night but in all actuality it is a huge ball of gas way bigger than the earth.