Why does the Andromeda constellation seem to contain stars on every website I look it up on?

Question

It's definitely not just the angle from which it appears in the diagram. The lines connecting the stars seem to make completely different shapes from one website to the next.

Answer 1

M31 is the famous Andromeda galaxy, our nearest large neighbor galaxy, forming the Local Group of galaxies together with its companions (including M32 and M110, two bright dwarf elliptical galaxies), our Milky Way and its companions, M33, and others.

The reason it figures so much on the web, is that it is visible to the naked eye even under moderate conditions, this object was known as the "little cloud" to the Persian astronomer Abd-al-Rahman Al-Sufi, who described and depicted it in 964 AD in his Book of Fixed Stars: It must have been observed by and commonly known to Persian astronomers at Isfahan as early as 905 AD, or earlier. With so much history, its bound to pop up a few times when you do a search

R.H. Allen (1899/1963) reports that it was also appeared on a Dutch starmap of 1500. Charles Messier, who cataloged it on August 3, 1764, was obviously unaware of this early reports, and ascribed its discovery to Simon Marius, who was the first to give a telescopic description in 1612, but (according to R.H. Allen) didn't claim its discovery. Unaware of both Al Sufi's and Marius' discovery, Giovanni Batista Hodierna independently rediscovered this object before 1654. Edmond Halley, however, in his 1716 treat of "Nebulae", accounts the discovery of this "nebula" to the French astronomer Bullialdus (Ismail Bouillaud), who observed it in 1661; but Bullialdus mentions that it had been seen 150 years earlier (in the early 1500s) by some anonymous astronomer (R.H. Allen, 1899/1963).

It was longly believed that the "Great Andromeda Nebula" was one of the nearest nebulae. William Herschel believed, wrongly of course, that its distance would "not exceed 2000 times the distance of Sirius" (17,000 light years); nevertheless, he viewed it at the nearest "island universe" like our Milky Way which he assumed to be a disk of 850 times the distance of Sirius in diameter, and of a thickness of 155 times that distance.

It was William Huggins, the pioneer of spectroscopy, who noted in 1864 the difference between gaseous nebula with their line spectra and those "nebulae" with star-like, continuous spectra, which we now know as galaxies, and found a continuous spectrum for M31 (Huggins and Miller 1864).

In 1887, Isaac Roberts obtained the first photographs of the Andromeda "Nebula," which showed the basic features of its spiral structure for the first time.

In 1912, V.M. Slipher of Lowell Observatory measured the radial velocity of the Andromeda "nebula" and found it the highest velocity ever measured, about 300 km/sec in approach.

In 1923, Edwin Hubble found the first Cepheid variable in the Andromeda galaxy and thus established the intergalactic distance and the true nature of M31 as a galaxy. Because he was not aware of the two Cepheid classes, his distance was incorrect by a factor of more than two, though. This error was not discovered until 1953, when the 200-inch Palomar telescope was completed and had started observing. Hubble published his epochal study of the Andromeda "nebula" as an extragalactic stellar system (galaxy) in 1929 (Hubble 1929).

Thus the Andromeda galaxy is certainly the most studied

Answer 2

Hi. One of the stars in Andromeda was moved to a different constellation. It used to be the only star shared by two constellations (the other was Pegasus), but powers greater than me decided to stop this.

Answer 3

Constellations are only pretty pictures joining bright stars. There is no absolute definitions on where the boundary between one constellation and another are, it is all arbitrary. And astronomers will not lose time defining such boundaries because it does not add anything to their work, as most stars are located through their position -- right ascension and declination -- anyway.
Therefore any reference you may have will be the result of "artistic" decision on the part of the author of said reference as to where the boundaries are.

Answer 4

I think it is because the beautiful Andromeda has the brightest and most magnificent M31 galaxy of stars of the Northern sky.
It might be used as a reference to find other constellations with our naked eye.

Answer 5

The falling stars which you relatively see are no longer stars they are meteors and those meteors often burn out earlier accomplishing the floor via fact of air friction. And concerning stars they do no longer fall they actually grow to be black holes which will posses very intense gravity to an volume such that even easy won't be able to bypass through.

Answer 6

It's because Andromeda *is* full of stars.


Doug