Andromeda Galaxy

“ If you can break through the enemy's patrol around the galaxy's edge, can cross the mighty void which never yet has any of our galaxy crossed, and can carry to the Andromeda universe our appeal for help, it may be that you will save us all—it may be that you will save the races and civilizations of all the Federated Suns from conquest and annihilation and death. ”

“ Amos Carhill said. "Here are our reference points. Here's Andromeda Galaxy, and the dark nebula, and the arch of our own Milky Way." He pointed to the places he had named on the plates. "Now we can check some of these high magnitude reference stars with the charts."
Hugh let him take the charts and go through them, checking, rejecting. Carhill was probably right. He'd find Sol soon enough.
It had been too long for one shipful of people to follow a quest, especially a hopeless one. For fifty-three years they had scouted the galaxy, looking for other worlds with life forms. ”

“ Stars, like luminous lice crawling on the black body of eternity...."
... Velocity and acceleration needles met in the center of the gauge. No change in the relation of the ship to anything was apparent, and none would be. Out of the warp, the ship hung, unmoving, in a vastness of dark. Even the galaxies showed but faintly in the visiplates. Destination was the spiral M31 in Andromeda, but the rest of Andromeda lay far behind, and a faint smudge ahead seemed as far away as the home galaxy, which was exactly the case. ”

“ Spencer has pointed out that no nebula which could be resolved into stars could possibly lie outside the limits of the galaxy or of the great system of which our solar system is a member; for the outer edges of that system are so far irresolvable. It was generally agreed that, if any nebula lay outside of the system, it was this one in Andromeda. Now, if a star is distinguished in this body, it is clear also that it too must lie within our system. ”

“ There is, indeed, little direct evidence that other such systems exist, but the Andromeda nebula is not altogether unlike a galaxy with a central cloud of stars, and in the southern hemisphere, invisible in our latitudes, are two remarkable stellar bodies like the Milky Way in appearance, but cut off from all apparent connection with it, much as we might expect to find independent stellar systems, if such there be. ”

“ All have billions of stars, but none of the stars have life. To find life outside your galaxy you must seek it across almost a million light years. My people live in Andromeda.
"Guarding the flank of their galaxy and speeding through inter-galactic space at many light years per minute is what you might call a space station—but on a scale you've never dreamed of. Five of your miles in diameter, it is a fortress of terrible strength, a storehouse of half a million years of weapon development. It has been arranged that the one man running this station—"
"Just one?" Temple asked. ”

“ No other of the white nebulæ compares with the Andromeda nebula in size, and their average distance apart may perhaps be ten times as great. We will suppose that each galaxy is at the center of an otherwise unoccupied cube 10 andromedes on an edge. The radius of a sphere containing 450,000 such cubes is 760,000 light-years. ”

“ In the intervening days those crews, those thousands of gaseous Andromedans, had been the recipients of the galaxy's frantic gratitude at having lifted from it the shadow of doom that had hung upon it, in all that time when the serpent-creatures, in the Cancer cluster, had prepared to spread out in their great conquest. Sun had vied with sun, and world with world, to do the Andromedans honor, for they it was, as all in the galaxy knew, who had gathered the mighty fleet that had rushed across the void to our universe's aid. ”

“ Gaseous Andromedans in their long, flat ships, writhing serpent-creatures with their oval craft, strange, dissimilar shapes from the races of all the galaxy's suns in their great, cigar-like hulls—all swayed and smote and stabbed there together in that stupendous struggle, pale beam and red ray and unseen shaft of force whirling this way and that through the seas of raging fire through which we reeled. On and on we whirled, all thought of everything but the enemy ships before us gone as each of the thousands of ships struck out with all its powers for its races, its universe! ”

“ Into our craft we stepped, up into its pilot room with Korus Kan at the controls once more, and then we were driving up from the great world beneath, with the five thousand Andromedan ships behind us, were slanting up and outward—out from that world, out from great Canopus, until it was dwindling and diminishing behind us, out through the galaxy's swarming suns and past the great nebula that had been the Cancer cluster, until we were driving out from the galaxy's edge into the great void once again. ”

“ Vassilis Cosmo, seated at the eye-piece of the great equatorial telescope on Mount Austral, with his hand on the switch which controlled the electric currents that were waiting to do his bidding, watched the fields of space darken, and the stars of Andromeda shine out. Just a little below the line which joins the Square of Pegasus with the constellation of Cassiopeia, he saw, as usual, the oval, luminous cloud of the great nebula in Andromeda. ”

“ As the mighty swarm of Andromeda ships from behind us drove down upon the half-thousand serpent-craft ahead, I could only stare for a moment in stupefied surprize, so stunning had been our sudden transition from death to deliverance. I saw the long, flat craft of the Andromedans, a full thousand in number, flashing down on the serpent-ships in one great swoop, saw the latter, in groups, in dozens, in scores, crumpling and constricting as the deadly cylinders of the Andromedan ships were turned toward them. ”

“ It was clear that for the present the Andromeda universe could not be conquered, so they turned at a right angle, and after flashing a message by some means of etheric communication to the masses of their peoples in the dying universe, struck out through the infinite void in a new direction, toward our own universe. ”

“ All these worlds form a vast annular system, of which our solar system is a modest member; though order is not perfect—Arcturus and others obey no law of harmonious motion, and collisions are not unknown. Nor is our idea of the vastness of the universe limited here. Other stellar universes are thought to be perceived—the great Andromeda nebula is probably one at a distance of six million billion miles at least. In fine, the old space-limits have entirely vanished; every increase of instrumental range reveals new worlds—we have no warrant for putting limits to the cosmos. ”

“ If we have any assurance that the star is surrounded by a mass of this glowing vapor, then it may be possible to measure that nebula’s distance. It will occasionally happen that grounds can be found for believing that a star which appears to be in the glowing gas does veritably lie therein, and is not merely seen in the same direction. There are hundreds of stars visible on a good drawing or a good photograph of the famous object in Andromeda, and doubtless large numbers of these are merely stars which happen to lie in the same line of sight. ”

“ They may then pass to other solar realms, and wander over the varied bosom of Andromeda's triple suns of blue and green and sapphire tints that whirl like globes of rainbow beauty in the azure sky, and see the double stars and multiple suns, and fiery comets with their glowing spooms, and blood-red meteors, all following harmonious orbits through the pulsing voids of space, vibrating to the rythmic cadence of electric law. All moving with tranquil majesty in the trackless seas of immensity obedient to the Omnipotent Will. ”

“ We know that they spread through the Milky Way millions of years ago. They wiped out life in their paths and colonized. There is evidence to indicate they struck the Solar System at that time. There are things to show they denuded Mars and attenuated its atmosphere. Earth may not have been sufficiently developed then to interest them. We don't know. We know that when Earth began colonizing the planets of other suns in our own galaxy the Andromedians didn't take much notice at first. But as our strength grew they decided we were a threat. ”

“ Andromeda is always represented as a woman in distress, and the sea monster has always been understood to be her persecutor, and from his mouth pours forth the stream Eridanus.
The constellation Andromeda presents a beautiful appearance rising in the eastern sky in the early evening during the months of autumn. Low over the hills twinkle her chain of stars, sweeping down in a long graceful curve from the Great Square of Pegasus, like tiny lamps swinging from an invisible wire, a chain of gold with which heroic Perseus holds in check his winged steed. ”

“ He suggests that the inner part of the nebula [the “nucleus”] “corresponds to the complex of those stars which do not belong to the Milky Way, while the latter corresponds to the spirals of the Andromeda nebula.” [366] On this view of the matter we may suppose that the component particles are small bodies widely separated, and in this way the mean density of the Andromeda nebula may be very small indeed. They cannot be large bodies, as the largest telescopes have failed to resolve the nebula into stars, and photographs show no sign of resolution. ”

“ From a consideration of these photographs we may, I think, assume a thickness of about one-hundredth of the diameter. This would give a thickness for the Andromeda nebulæ of about 500 times the sun’s distance from the earth. This great thickness will give some idea of the vast proportions of the object we are dealing with. The size of the whole solar system—large as it is—is small in comparison. The diameter and thickness found above can easily be converted into miles, and from these dimensions the actual volume of the nebula can be compared with that of the sun. ”

“ Above the Bull and the Ram is Perseus, having at his right... [11] with the Pleiades moving beneath, and at his left the head of the Ram. His right hand rests on the likeness of Cassiopea, and with his left he holds the Gorgon's head by its top over the Ram, laying it at the feet of Andromeda.
3. Above Andromeda are the Fishes, one above her belly and the other above the backbone of the Horse. A very bright star terminates both the belly of the Horse and the head of Andromeda. Andromeda's right hand rests above the likeness of Cassiopea, and her left above the Northern Fish. ”

“ In fact, the composition of the great nebula of Andromeda is still a mystery, and remains for one of you boys to study when he has become a great astronomer.
Still one more strange star we will notice before we leave this part of the heavens. ”

“ Flight is impossible, for there are not enough ships in the Galaxy to transport the trillions of the solar system's population to another star in the four weeks that are left to us. There is but one chance—one blind, slender chance—and that is to turn aside this onward-thundering dark star from its present inward-curving path, to cause it to pass our sun and the Galaxy's edge far enough away to be harmless. ”

“ Andromeda turned and dropped on her knees beside him to give him a hug, and his eyes twinkled like stars.
“‘Bless his little heart!’ said Cassiopeia. ‘I wish we could keep his birthday, but nobody knows when it is.’
“‘But we love him just the same!’ said Andromeda, rubbing his fur the wrong way and ending with a little shake of his nose—and the sparks flew as if he were a garden of meteors himself. ”

“ The great majority of the nebulae, however, show the second variety of spectrum, and are thus indistinguishable spectroscopically from irresolvable star-clusters. The great nebula of Andromeda and the spiral nebulae are of this kind. It is not necessary to conclude that they, therefore, are star-clusters whose components are, owing to their remoteness from us, too faint and close together to be separately distinguishable. A gaseous mass only gives a bright line spectrum when it is so rarefied as to be transparent through and through. ”

“ So the Star People understood just what Andromeda meant when she exclaimed, from her chink in the cloud:—
“‘The Bee Baby is left all alone by himself in that strip of forest on the ridge!’
“‘Are you thure? I didn’t thee him,’ said Draco, at another chink.
“‘You’re always imagining things,’ said Orion.
“‘I didn’t imagine this,’ insisted Andromeda. ‘The light from Lady Moon’s lantern shone through for a moment, and I saw him plainly—standing in front of a dark hole in the rock. Then he ran back, as if he were frightened.’
“‘Well, I’d like to know what his people are made of!’ said Cassiopeia. ”

“ They preserve in the stars, more lasting than parchment or stone, one of the oldest and most pleasing of all the romantic stories that have amused and inspired the minds of men—the story of Perseus and Andromeda—a better story than any that modern novelists have invented. The four constellations to which I refer bear the names of Andromeda, Perseus, Cassiopeia, and Cepheus, and are sometimes called, collectively, the Royal Family. In the autumn they occupy a conspicuous position in the sky, forming a group that remains unrivaled until the rising of Orion with his imperial cortége. ”

“ The origin of the constellation known to us as Andromeda is lost in remote antiquity, but the myth that relates to Andromeda, the daughter of Cepheus and Cassiopeia, and associated with the constellation, is probably as well known to-day as any that has come down to us. ”