ANDROMEDA GALAXY

                                                                                                                                                                       ANDROMEDA GALAXY                                                                                                                                                                                       Andromeda I is a dwarf spheroidal galaxy(dSph) about 2.40 million light-years away in the constellation Andromeda. Andromeda I is part of the Local group of galaxies and a satellite galaxy of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31). It is roughly 3.5 degrees south and slightly east of M31. As of 2005, it is the closest known dSph companion to M31 at an estimated projected distance of ~40 kpc or ~150,000[6] light-years.

Andromeda I was discovered by Sidney van den Bergh in 1970 with the Mount Palomar Observatory 48-inch telescope. Further study of Andromeda I was done by the WFPC2 camera of the Hubble Space Telescope. This found that the horizontal branch stars, like other dwarf spheroidal galaxies were predominantly red. From this, and the abundance of blue horizontal branch stars, along with 99 RR Lyrae stars detected in 2005,lead to the conclusion there was an extended epoch of star formation. The estimated age is approximately 10 Gyr. The Hubble telescope also found a globular cluster in Andromeda I, being the least luminous galaxy where such a cluster was found.

The Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi wrote a line about the chained constellation in his Book of Fixed Stars around 964, describing it as a "small cloud". Star charts of that period have it labeled as the Little Cloud. The first description of the object based on telescopic observation was given by German astronomer Simon Marius on December 15, 1612.Charles Messier catalogued it as object M31 in 1764 and incorrectly credited Marius as the discoverer, unaware of Al Sufi's earlier work. In 1785, the astronomer William Herschel noted a faint reddish hue in the core region of M31. He believed it to be the nearest of all the "great nebulae" and based on the color and magnitude of the nebula, he incorrectly guessed that it was no more than 2,000 times the distance of Sirius.

William Huggins in 1864 observed the spectrum of M31 and noted that it differed from a gaseous nebula. The spectra of M31 displayed a continuum of frequencies, superimposed with dark absorption lines that help identify the chemical composition of an object. The Andromeda nebula was very similar to the spectra of individual stars, and from this it was deduced that M31 had a stellar nature. In 1885, a supernova (known as S Andromedae) was seen in M31, the first and so far only one observed in that galaxy. At the time M31 was considered to be a nearby object, so the cause was thought to be a much less luminous and unrelated event called a nova, and was named accordingly "Nova 1885".

The first photographs of M31 were taken in 1887 by Isaac Roberts from his private observatory in Sussex, England. The long-duration exposure allowed the spiral structure of the galaxy to be seen for the first time.However, at the time this object was still commonly believed to be a nebula within our galaxy, and Roberts mistakenly believed that M31 and similar spiral nebulae were actually solar systems being formed, with the satellites nascent planets.[citation needed] The radial velocity of this object with respect to our solar system was measured in 1912 by


Vesto Slipher at the Lowell Observatory, using spectroscopy. The result was the largest velocity recorded at that time, at 300 kilometres per second (190 mi/s), moving in the direction of the Sun.