All articles tagged with #local group
The Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies, the two largest in the Local Group, orbit a common center of mass and are on mostly radial orbits toward each other. This will eventually lead to a collision and merger into a single elliptical galaxy in about 4.5 billion years. The Local Group is also moving towards the Virgo Cluster, but will not reach it due to the universe's expansion.
A recent study summarizes the various methods used to determine the mass of the Milky Way, including measuring the motion of stars, globular clusters, satellite galaxies, tidal plumes of dwarf galaxies, and stars leaving our galaxy. The team took a statistical average of these methods and determined the best value for the mass of our galaxy to be a trillion solar masses, give or take a few hundred billion solar masses.
Using cosmological simulations, an international team predicts that there may be up to 12 ultra-diffuse galaxies in the Local Group, a small cluster that currently contains approximately 60 known galaxies, including the Milky Way and Andromeda. Ultra-diffuse galaxies are faint and difficult to observe, but understanding their total number in the Local Group is crucial to our understanding of the cosmos. The discovery of these new galaxies could have far-reaching implications for our understanding of galaxy formation and evolution.