She overwhelmed us when we first saw her — literally opening up whole new universes of possibility:
Andromeda, a hop and a skip away in galactic terms at 2.5 million light years, was the first galaxy to be recognised outside the Milky Way, and the nearest spiral galaxy to our own.
Its discovery transformed our understanding of the universe. Beforehand it was thought that the mere 200 billion or so stars of the Milky Way represented the entire cosmos.
Since Andromeda was confirmed to be a separate entity, itself containing around a trillion stars, the estimate has grown to include more than 100 billion galaxies, each containing tens or hundreds of billions of stars.
And now, all these years later, we notice her again and find her to be as graceful, mysterious, and alluring as ever. Nice neighborhood we live in, isn’t it?