Clouds Around Galaxy Andromeda
Image Credit & Copyright:
Andrew Fryhover
What are those red clouds surrounding the Andromeda galaxy?
This galaxy, M31, is often imaged by planet Earth-based astronomers.
As the nearest large spiral galaxy, it is a familiar sight
with dark dust lanes, bright yellowish core, and
spiral arms traced
by clouds of bright blue stars.
A mosaic of well-exposed broad and narrow-band image data,
this deep portrait of our
neighboring island universe offers
strikingly unfamiliar features though,
faint reddish clouds of glowing
ionized hydrogen gas in the same wide field of view.
Most of the ionized hydrogen clouds surely
lie in the foreground of the scene, well within our
Milky Way Galaxy.
They are likely associated with the pervasive, dusty
interstellar cirrus
clouds scattered hundreds of
light-years above our own
galactic plane.
Some of the clouds, however, occur right in the
Andromeda galaxy itself, and some in
M110,
the small galaxy just below.