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Asked by chrisvw to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 13 Mar 2012.
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Leila Battison answered on 12 Mar 2012:
It is 2.6 million light years away, which makes it the closest spiral galaxy to our own. (It’s not the closes galaxy overall, that goes to Canis Major, just 25,000 light years away)
Andromeda is so big and so close that you can see its bright middle bit without a telescope. The whole galaxy is about six times as wide as the moon, but most of it is too dark to see without a telescope.
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Karen Masters answered on 13 Mar 2012:
Andromeda is our nearest large galaxy, but even so it’s amazingly far away. The guys who answered first already Googled the number – 2.6 million light years! So let’s put that in perspective. Light (which travels really fast) takes 8 minutes to get to use from the Sun, about 4 years from the nearest star, and about 20,000 years to cross our galaxy. But it takes 2.6 million years to reach us from the Andromeda galaxy! 😉
Andromeda is actually getting closer though – at about 100km per second! It’s one of just a few nearby galaxies which are not redshifted, but blueshifted (ie. moving towards us, not away). That’s because Andromeda and our Galaxy are attracting each other by their gravity, and we think will collide in about 4-5 billion years time.
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