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
The Shaping of Middle-earth High-Elves) in the first pages of every "History of Middle-earth" volume, written by Christopher Tolkien and describing the contents of the book. The inscription in Book IV reads: The Shaping of Middle-earth The Shaping of Middle-earth (1986) is the fourth volume of Christopher Tolkien's 12-volume series "The History of Middle-earth" in which he analyses the unpublished manuscripts of his father J. R. R. Tolkien. In "The Shaping of Middle-earth" the gradual transition from the "primitive" legendaria of "The Book of Lost Tales" to what would become "The Silmarillion" is described, and it contains a text which could be seen as