Dozens of dwarf galaxies swarming around the Andromeda Galaxy like bees have been caught on camera by the Hubble Space Telescope, which took more than a thousand orbits of the Earth to take enough images to get a full family portrait of Andromeda's brightest satellites.
The 36 dwarf galaxies are varied in their properties, and many exhibit puzzling orbits that conventional theories have so far been unable to explain. The solutions to these mysteries could reveal much about how the Andromeda Galaxy — which is the closest large spiral galaxy to us, sitting about 2.5 million light-years away — formed and developed.
