WASHINGTON: NASA scientists have found giant Halo around the Andromeda Galaxy. Andromeda is our neighbor galaxy. They found the Halo with the help of Hubble Space Telescope.
The dark and nearly invisible halo stretched about one million light-years from its host galaxy, halfway to our Milky Way galaxy. The Andromeda galaxy is 2.5 million light-years away from our Milky Way galaxy and looks like a faint spindle.
Halos are the gaseous atmospheres of galaxies. The gargantuan halo is estimated to contain half the mass of the stars in the Andromeda galaxy itself, in the form of a hot, diffuse gas. If it could be viewed with the naked eye, the halo would be 100 times the diameter of the full moon in the sky. This is equivalent to the patch of sky covered by two basketballs held at arm’s length.
