The Canis Majoris Dwarf Galaxy is the closest galaxy to us, located 25,000 light-years away from the Solar System and 42,000 light-years from the Milky Way’s core. It was discovered in 2003 and is being torn apart by the Milky Way’s gravitational pull, with its stars eventually becoming part of the primary mass.
The Canis Majoris Dwarf Galaxy is the closest galaxy to our location in the Milky Way. At just 25,000 light-years away from the Solar System, it’s even slightly closer to us than the core of our galaxy. The Canis Majoris Dwarf Galaxy is located about 42,000 light-years from the galactic core of the Milky Way. It is the latest in a recently discovered series of small galaxies that are moving ever closer to Earth, the most recent being the Sagittarius Dwarf elliptical galaxy.
The Canis Majoris dwarf galaxy was discovered relatively recently, in 2003, by a team of astronomers from France, Italy, the United Kingdom and Australia, using data derived from the Two-Micron All Sky Survey. The galaxy would have been discovered much earlier, but from our point of view it lies behind the galactic disk, which is filled with opaque dust, and the galaxy itself is relatively small, with “only” a hundred million stars.
The Canis Majoris Dwarf Galaxy is an irregularly shaped galaxy, as it is currently in the process of being torn apart by the gravitational pull of the Milky Way. In fact, before the galaxy itself was discovered, astronomers conducting the Sloan Digital Sky Survey found a thin ring of stars encircling the Milky Way, which they dubbed the Monoceros Ring. The Monoceros Ring is an example of a stellar stream, formed by tidal forces. It wraps around the Milky Way a total of three times.
Hundreds of millions of years ago, the Canis Majoris dwarf galaxy was probably considerably larger than it is today, and some astronomers estimate that it may have contributed as much as 1 percent of the Milky Way’s present-day stellar material. As our galaxy eats up the Canis Majoris Dwarf through gravity, eventually all of its stars will be integrated into the Milky Way, becoming nearly indistinguishable from the primary mass.
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