 today I'm talking about Andromeda! it's our nearest galaxy apart from dwarf galaxies. it's about two and a half million light years away, which sounds like a far way away, but it's not that far really. we're actually on a collision course with the Andromeda galaxy. we're supposed to merge with it in about four billion years or so, but a recent really awesome discovery actually discovered that there's this hot gas aura, hot gas atmosphere around the Andromeda galaxy that stretching around two million light years into diameter. so the Andromeda galaxy might actually be touching us already. it's like the Andromeda galaxy is a really terrible date that does that horrible fake yawn move. hey Milky Way. it's like Andromeda galaxy is that really annoying sibling that would put its finger right in front of your face and say not touching you, not touching you, not touching you. mom! Andromeda galaxy is touching me! but the Andromeda galaxy is actually awesome because we're still learning so much about it. actually Hubble released its largest image yet of the Andromeda galaxy and it is massive. it's a whopping 70,000 by 22,000 pixels wide. you can get totally lost in it. there's actually a really cool space hack on twitter called Andromeda bot that's actually tweeting out a little piece of that huge massive picture, a little piece at a time. other things i find really fascinating about the Andromeda galaxy is that it hasn't even been a hundred years since we thought that the Milky Way galaxy was the only galaxy that existed. a hundred years ago we thought Milky Way was the only galaxy in the entire universe. that maybe there were some nebulas and other stuff at the fringes of the Milky Way galaxy but we were the only galaxy. it wasn't until 1924 when Edwin Hubble spent lots and lots of time staring at a blob in his telescope that he discovered that this thing called the Andromeda nebula was actually called the Andromeda galaxy. he actually discovered that it was another galaxy and that we are actually one of many galaxies in our universe. of course now we know there are billions and billions of galaxies in our universe. also an interesting fact to know is that actually the very first known depiction of the Andromeda galaxy was made in the year 964 by a Persian astronomer who described it as a little cloud in front of a fish, the fish being an arabic constellation. we went from 964 the very first known depiction of the Andromeda galaxy to 1924, the very first known actual acknowledgement that it is a galaxy into itself. so it only took us about a thousand years of observing it to actually realize that it was a galaxy. what i find kind of geeky awesome is the fact that actually osx famously shipped with the Andromeda galaxy as its default desktop wallpaper and so we as geeks have actually spent a lot of time looking at the very same thing that Edwin Hubble and Persian astronomers have spent much of their time looking at as well. thanks for geeking out with me this week. remember to subscribe on youtube, leave a comment, and please donate to the patreon campaign to support dorky awesome space pods like this one.