Cosmos M31
A team of amateur astronomers led by Marcel Drechsler, Xavier Strottner and Yann Sainty made a surprising discovery to win the overall prize in the 2023 Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. “Andromeda, Unexpected” shows a huge plasma arc next to the Andromeda Galaxy, the closest large spiral galaxy to our Milky Way.
The Andromeda Galaxy is a barred spiral galaxy and is the nearest major galaxy to the Milky Way, where the Solar System resides. It was originally named the Andromeda Nebula and is cataloged as Messier 31, M31, and NGC 224. Andromeda has a diameter of about 46.56 kiloparsecs (152,000 light-years) and is approximately 765 kpc (2.5 million light-years) from Earth. The galaxy’s name stems from the area of Earth’s sky in which it appears, the constellation of Andromeda, which itself is named after the princess who was the wife of Perseus in Greek mythology.
