M31

A "beautiful and terrifying" novel about family, faith, and the search for home (San Francisco Chronicle), set amidst a community of UFO cultists in middlest America. As regular guests on late-night radio shows, Dash and Dot are the world's most in-demand lecturers on the topic of UFOs and alien abduction. They believe that we are all descended from M31, the nearest galaxy to ours, and divide their time between life on the road and a decommissioned church in the Midwest. A radar dish on its steeple and a spaceship in its sanctuary complete the modern nuclear-family setting. When a couple of UFO groupies arrive at the church with their own agenda, everything changes, brought to a head by their strange beliefs and the timeless difficulties of modern life. Dash and Dot set out on their last trip, their ultimate journey, with a destination that no one could foretell. Written with a fevered vividness and immediacy, M31: A Family Romance has been hailed as "a devastatingly forceful accomplishment" from "a star of the first magnitude" (the Washington Post).

M31, better known as the Andromeda Galaxy, is the nearest grand spiral galaxy. Its proximity allows us to reach high spatial resolutions and study it in great detail. Already early analysis of the polarized emission has shown that the turbulent and large-scale magnetic field is concentrated in a ring-like structure at 10 kpc radius. The presence of a regular field over such long distances can be explained by galactic dynamo theory. However, the structure of the M31's large-scale magnetic field is unusually simple. An almost purely axisymmetric field is not known from any other spiral galaxy. The aim of this work is to provide new clues to the understanding of M31's magnetic field structure, by utilizing new methods for data analysis, better resolutions and higher sensitivities than ever before, and by advancing into new wavelength regimes.