Word: andromedae
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Shapley also believes that the Milky Way, our own galactic system, can no longer be ranked as the largest galaxy. The famed spiral nebula in Andromeda now appears to be at least as large and is actually 1,500,000 light years away, twice as far as the previous figure...
...last week's Nature magazine, R. Hanbury Brown and C. Hazard of Britain's University of Manchester announced that they had detected radio stars in M. 31, the great spiral nebula in Andromeda, 750,000 light-years from the earth. They did the job with the largest radio telescope (a trellis-like "dish" of wires) at Jodrell Bank Experimental Station south of Manchester. Normally this telescope points upward, receiving radio waves from a narrow "beam" directly overhead. If the mast at the center is swung 14° to one side, the telescope points, in effect, toward the Andromeda...
...slightly to cover a different strip of sky. In the four middle sweeps they found what they were looking for: low peaks in the curves representing radio energy reaching the telescope. Careful analysis of the curves showed that the waves must have come from an oval object like the Andromeda nebula seen with visible light...
...calculated how much radio energy is sent out by the Milky Way galaxy, another vast swirl of billions of stars, of which the sun is a part. Then they calculated what this radio source would look like to their radio telescope if it were as far away as the Andromeda nebula. The calculations showed that it would look much the same. This went far to prove what astronomers had long suspected: the Milky Way galaxy is a "twin...
...radio waves from Andromeda proved also that radio stars are not peculiar to the "local" galaxy, i.e., the Milky Way. They are probably common in all , the galaxies scattered through the depths of space. Dr. A. C. B. Lovell, head of Jodrell Bank, suspects that they are just as numerous as the visible stars. They may be stars being formed, he speculates, out of interstellar gas. They may be dying stars (black dwarfs) too cool to shed visible light. Or they may be something new and still undreamed of by astronomers...