I'm John Batsw with my friend and colleague Dr. Ken Kraswell.

His book, The Alchemy of the Heavens focuses on Andromeda and other galaxies that are

rich in both beauty and star formation. Now we're talking about the evidence of a collision that happened X number a billion years ago to

Andrometer our near neighbor and is there evidence of that and we go to an elliptical galaxy small called M32. Why is it a suspect can?

Well M32 is a very strange galaxy so that's that's the first thing and we've just been discussing all

this evidence and Drometer has recently experienced a big collision and you've

got this very strange galaxy that is really close to the center of the Andromeda

Galaxy.

It's M32, it's a compact elliptical galaxy.

Now normally elliptical galaxies consist solely of old stars, but this galaxy, I'm 32, actually

has young stars and guess what the youngest stars in that galaxy are? They're 2 billion years old. the billion years ago. One thing we didn't mention and I should have mentioned is that also at

that time from about two to four billion years ago we have good evidence that the

entire disk of Andromeda just lit up with new star formation.

Okay, so there's an excess, there's a glut of stars and Andromeda's disk that are 2 to 4 billion

years old. So we've got this strange galaxy M32 that also has stars that go up to 2 billion

years old which is not typical for elliptical galaxies. On top of that, that

galaxy is quite rich in iron and other heavy elements. Now I mentioned before that you know the more stars a galaxy has the more iron the galaxy should have but in the case of M32 it's a small galaxy or rather it's currently a small galaxy and so the suspicion is aha.

Well, M32 is actually simply the center of

what used to be a large spiral galaxy that collided with

the Andromeda Galaxy and that would explain why it's so

rich in iron and it would also explain why it's been able to form stars so recently, as recently

as two billion years ago because it used to have gas and dust in it.

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