Andromeda Galaxy Andromeda Galaxy The Andromeda Galaxy (), also known as Messier 31, M31, or NGC 224, is a spiral galaxy approximately 780 kiloparsecs (2.5 million light-years) from Earth, and the nearest major galaxy to the Milky Way. Its name stems from the area of the sky in which it appears, the constellation of Andromeda. The 2006 observations by the Spitzer Space Telescope revealed that the Andromeda Galaxy contains approximately one trillion stars, more than twice the number of the Milky Way's estimated 200 to 400 billion stars. The Andromeda Galaxy's mass is estimated to be around 1.76 times that of the
Gioiello (galaxy cluster) Gioiello (galaxy cluster) The Gioiello Galaxy Cluster was discovered using high redshift with NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory from a research group led by Paolo Tozzi and Joana Santos. Gioiello is the most distant massive galaxy cluster that has been found and studied today. This massive galaxy cluster weighs 400 trillion times the mass of the sun and is located 9.6 billion light years away from Earth. Gioiello, meaning Jewel in Italian, was given to this massive galaxy cluster because an image of the cluster contains many beautiful pink, purple, and red sparkling colors from the hot X-ray emitting gas and