4/1/2023 0 Comments Volume of local cloud galaxyEven so, astronomers are keen to better understand these featherweights of the cosmos. Dwarf irregular galaxies in the Local Group can have just a few thousand stars, which makes them downright pint-sized compared with the Milky Way and its hundreds of billions of stars. They’re visually unimpressive and resemble jumbles of stars - blink and you’ll miss them - with not a spiral arm in sight. Dwarf irregular galaxies, as their name suggests, are low in mass and lack geometrical structure. Comparatively puny galaxies often collide with more massive galaxies, their meager stockpiles of gas and dust being absorbed into the larger system of stars. By studying the Local Group, astronomers can observe galaxies in their entirety, no longer confined to understanding a galaxy from the inside out.Īstronomers on Earth have front-row seats to the show of galaxy formation in the Local Group. This population of galaxies, spread over roughly 10 million light-years, encompasses not only the Milky Way and several bright galaxies visible to the naked eye, but also many much smaller galaxies that dominate the Local Group by number. The approximately 85 gravitationally bound galaxies near the Milky Way are collectively known as the Local Group. Even now, in the era of space-based telescopes and sensitive cameras, backyard and professional astronomers alike can easily devote lifetimes to studying the Milky Way and its planets, stars, and nebulae.īut a peek over the celestial fence beyond the Milky Way’s tenuous halo yields a rich view of the nearby universe and galaxy evolution in progress. After all, the Milky Way is our home galaxy, and its billions of stars provided enough of a nighttime show to fascinate stargazers for millennia. That’s the Local Group - it’s where we live.”įor most of human history, it was inconceivable that anything existed beyond the Milky Way. Then, one day, someone put two lenses together to make a telescope, looked round, and saw many tiny villages scattered around the surrounding hills and realized that the maps had to be redrawn. “For a long time, those were the only other villages known. “At nighttime you can see torches shining in two nearby villages, the Magellanic Clouds, and a more distant one, Andromeda,” he says. The Milky Way Galaxy is like a hilltop village, according to astronomer Andrew Fox.
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