Andromeda XXI

Andromeda XXI (And 21, And XXI) is a moderately bright dwarf spheroidal galaxy about 859 ± 51 kiloparsecs (2.80 ± 0.17 Mly) away from the Sun in the constellation Andromeda. It is the fourth largest Local Group dwarf spheroidal galaxy. The discovery arose from the first year data of a photometric survey of the M31/M33 subgroupings of the Local Group by the Pan-Andromeda Archaeological Survey (PAndAS). This survey was conducted with the Megaprime/MegaCam wide-field camera mounted on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope.

This large satellite of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) has a half-light radius of roughly 1 kpc.^[2]

Andromeda XXI appears as a spatial overdensity of stars. It has red giant branches at the distance of M31/M33, and follows metal-poor, [Fe/H]=-1.8 when plotted in a color-magnitude diagram.

Like other dwarf spheroidal galaxies, Andromeda XXI shows no sign of current star formation and appears to have had 90% of its stars formed 5.8 billion years ago.^[3] Its central dark matter density is lower than expected from the ΛCDM model, but this could be explained if it lost most of its mass in a previous tidal stripping event or had experience tidal shocks from an eccentric orbit.^[3]

Although moderately bright (M_V = −9.1 ± 0.3),^[3] it has low surface brightness. This indicates that numerous relatively luminous M31 satellites remain undiscovered.