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Astrophysics

Hidden chaos in cosmic order

Nature volume 461, pages 43–44 (2009)Cite this article

“Galaxies, like elephants, have long memories,” says an influential article from the 1980s. Tapping into these memories has revealed some surprising facts about the history of our neighbouring Andromeda galaxy.

Just like architects who enjoy the strict beauty of new buildings and disdain the ugliness of ruins, many twentieth-century astronomers expressed their contempt for that (actually not-so-small) class of irregular galaxies by calling them train wrecks. But as telescopes became bigger and astronomical cameras more sensitive, several astronomers found themselves in the role of archaeologists rather than architects — to the point of even adopting the word 'archaeology' in their studies. On page 66 of this issue, McConnachie et al.2 present the Pan-Andromeda Archaeological Survey (PAndAS), an excellent example of galactic archaeology in our own cosmic backyard. This large group of astronomers undertook a careful and painstaking study using the 3.6-metre Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope to map with unprecedented sensitivity (or depth, as astronomers like to call it) a large region around the Andromeda galaxy, a sister and neighbour galaxy to our own Milky Way.

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  1. Nickolay Y. Gnedin is in the Theoretical Astrophysics Group at Fermilab, Batavia, Illinois 60510, USA. gnedin@fnal.gov,

    Nickolay Y. Gnedin

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  1. Nickolay Y. Gnedin
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Gnedin, N. Hidden chaos in cosmic order. Nature 461, 43–44 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/461043a

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