NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has made some super cool discoveries about the Andromeda galaxy! Andromeda is our closest big neighbor in space. It’s about 2.5 million light-years away from us. That’s really far! You can even see it in the night sky as a faint, long shape. A long time ago, a scientist named Edwin Hubble showed us that our Milky Way galaxy isn’t the only one out there. This changed everything we knew about the universe!

Hubble’s recent studies of Andromeda have revealed that it has a fascinating history. This history is different from our Milky Way. By studying Andromeda, scientists learn more about spiral galaxies like ours. When we look at our own galaxy, we can’t see it as clearly as we can see Andromeda from the outside.

Hubble has helped scientists spot over 200 million stars in Andromeda! That’s a huge number! But guess what? There are even more stars—about 1 trillion in total! To gather all this information, Hubble worked super hard for over ten years. It took more than 1,000 trips around the galaxy to snap all those pictures. The project called Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT) focused on half of the galaxy first. Then, they checked out the other half with another project called PHAST.

The pictures Hubble took show us a lot about Andromeda’s shape and its stars. The galaxy is tilted at an angle of 77 degrees compared to Earth. That’s pretty cool! The images are made up of around 600 different views and have at least 2.5 billion pixels! This helps scientists learn about how old the stars are and what kinds of stars they are.

Even though Andromeda and the Milky Way formed around the same time billions of years ago, they have grown up differently over time. Scientists found that Andromeda has many younger stars and special features that we don’t see in our galaxy. This suggests that Andromeda had more exciting star-making events because it interacted with other galaxies.

Daniel Weisz from UC Berkeley described Andromeda as a “train wreck.” That sounds wild! He means that it has gone through many crazy events that caused bursts of star formation and then quiet times without much happening. One reason for this might be Messier 32, a smaller satellite galaxy that may have bumped into Andromeda in the past.

Hubble’s amazing findings will help future telescopes like NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. These new telescopes will take even clearer pictures of galaxies like Andromeda and help us learn even more!

In summary, Hubble’s work on Andromeda teaches us about its special history and helps us understand spiral galaxies better. As scientists keep studying these awesome galaxies, they will uncover even more secrets about how galaxies form and change over time!

Image Credit: “Andromeda Galaxy”, by nix1111 from Pixabay, “Hubble Space Telescopy” by Wikipedia, “Hubble M31 Mosaic” by NASA