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The Herschel image reveals intricate detail, with several rings of star-forming dust visible. Some astronomers speculate that this dust ring may have been formed in a recent collision with another galaxy. The Andromeda Galaxy is particularly interesting because, unlike other bright galaxies, it shows a large ring of dust that is about 75,000 light years across around the centre of the galaxy. Image credits: Robert Gendler (left) ESA/Herschel/SPIRE/HELGA (centre) ESA/XMM/EPIC/OM (right). The dust ring is clearly visible in the infrared, while the central bulge of the galaxy is prominent in x-rays. The Andromeda Galaxy seen in optical light, in the far-infrared by Herschel’s SPIRE instrument at 250, 350 and 500 microns (centre), and in x-rays by XMM-Newton (right). Professor Walter Gear, of Cardiff University, said “this image will allow us to study the global star formation in a galaxy remarkably similar to our own, but from the outside rather than with the limited view of our own galaxy we get from the inside”. While Herschel shows the cool and cold dust that shines because it is heated by the massive young stars that are forming within the dust clouds, XMM-Newton shows the endpoints of stellar evolution: on the one hand shock waves and ejected material in supernovae remnants, and on the other hand massive objects often in close binary systems. Both the Herschel and XMM-Newton observatories reveal regions of star formation in the Andromeda Galaxy: Herschel observes in the far infrared, while XMM-Newton is sensitive to X-Rays. In optical light, the stars are seen to form spiral arms of stars, separated by dark dust lanes, all slightly tilted over from our point of view.
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Its proximity makes the Andromeda Galaxy (aka M31) appear very large in the sky, as wide as almost 6 full moons, and on a dark night the bright central core can sometimes even be seen with the naked eye. At a relatively close distance of 2.5 million light years, Andromeda is very similar in size to the Milky Way, and provides a way to study star formation on galaxy-wide scales in great detail. But they are rarely completely isolated, and the Milky Way is accompanied by the Andromeda Galaxy.
Galaxies such as our own Milky Way are often described as island Universes, containing hundreds of billions of stars and measuring tens or hundreds of thousands of light years across. Over the Christmas period of 2010, the Herschel and ESA’s XMM-Newton satellite took images of our Galaxy’s nearest large neighbour, the Andromeda Galaxy. Update: you can see a video of the Andromeda Galaxy at a range of wavelengths over on the ESA website.