Andromeda Galaxy Far Larger Than Thought
From Times Staff and Wire Reports
The Andromeda galaxy is three times bigger than previously thought, astronomers said Monday.
Astronomers 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 more than 220,000 light-years across -- triple the previous estimate. It appears that the outer fringes of the disk were made when smaller galaxies slammed together, the astronomers from Caltech, the Observatoire Astronomique de Strasbourg in France and other facilities reported to a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Minneapolis.
