Regions of stars and interstellar matter that extend from the center of spiral galaxies, forming a spiral pattern; in the Milky Way, these include the Orion Arm where our Solar System resides.
31 December 1995

Just like our own Milky Way Galaxy, the nearest major galaxy M31 has many star systems spewing high energy radiation. High energy X-radiation is visible to certain satellites in Earth orbit such as ROSAT - which took the above picture. The X-ray sources in M31 occur in globular clusters, the spiral arms, and near the galaxy's center. Probably most of these sources are accretion disk binary star systems. M31 has more X-ray sources near its center than our Galaxy, and the reason for this is currently unknown.