A Tale of Many Islands: Getting to Know the Neighborhood
Triangulum Galaxy (Messier 33): Taken under Michigan skies November, 2021. If you haven't already, read this post first: A Tale of Many Islands . To recap, I mentioned the historic milestone where Edwin Hubble produced evidence confirming the existence of other galaxies by measuring the distance to the Andromeda Galaxy (Messier 31). With this new method in measuring distances and with the old single-galaxy worldview no longer holding us back, we embarked on a journey to grasp the true nature and structure of the universe. Massive achievements in astronomical data collection, radio telescopes and earth-orbiting telescopes paved the way for scientists to begin modeling our universe. Leveraging statistical grouping methods, galaxies are clustered together based on their observed locations and velocities. The Milky Way belongs to what we refer to as the Local Group . This is