A team of researcher led by Nicolas Lehner of Notre Dame succeeded in discovering a huge halo of gas encompassing the spiral galaxy Andromeda Galaxy. The discovery has been confirmed by the University of Notre Dame.

Andromeda, about 2,538,000 light years from the earth, is closest massive galaxy to earth’s Milky Way galaxy. According to some scientific reports, the Andromeda Galaxy is about 25% brighter than the Milky Way galaxy. It contains about twice as many stars as Milky Way has. Scientists said that the galaxy is the most massive object in Local Group of about 45 galaxies.

During the new research, Lehner and other researchers used about five years of observations collected by the space telescope the Hubble Space Telescope, which was launched into low earth orbit in 1990, to spot the halo and decide that it has extended about one million light-years outwards from Andromeda. As per the reports, the gigantic halo includes about as much mass as half of Andromeda’s trillion stars. Hubble telescope of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) detected gaseous halos around other distant galaxies away from the Milky Way, but Andromeda’s halo is the closest one to earth.

While talking about the new discovery, Lehner said, “Halos are the gaseous atmospheres of galaxies. The properties of these gaseous halos control the rate at which stars form in galaxies”. The Hubble telescope detected the halo in ultraviolet light with the help of its high-resolution spectroscope.

According to the researchers, they used about 18 extremely bright quasars located at different distances from Andromeda galaxy to find out the extent and existence of Andromeda’s halo. The light that quasars emitted is distorted as it passes through the gaseous halo.