The Local Group is a family of over 30 galaxies, including the Milky Way, Andromeda, and Triangulum. It contains small satellite galaxies and is located between the Milky Way and Andromeda. The Andromeda galaxy has more stars, but the Milky Way may be more massive due to dark matter. The Local Group is part of the Virgo Supercluster, which is moving towards the Great Attractor. Eventually, each galaxy will fall apart due to the expanding universe.
The local group of galaxies is the local gravitational family of the Milky Way. The Local Group consists of over 30 galaxies scattered across a region 10 million light-years in diameter. Its three main pieces are the Milky Way, the Andromeda Galaxy and the Triangulum Galaxy. Accompanying these galaxies are dozens of small satellite galaxies, one with only 100,000 stars, in contrast to the Milky Way’s 200-400 billion stars. Some of these satellites, called dwarf galaxies, include the Large Magellanic Cloud, Small Magellanic Cloud, Canis Major Dwarf, Ursa Minor Dwarf, and Draco Dwarf
The center of gravity of the Local Group is located somewhere between the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy, which are about two million light years apart. These galaxies could collide in two billion years to form a large elliptical galaxy. Because the Andromeda galaxy is moving towards the Sun at about 300 km/s (186 miles/sec.), it is one of the few blue-shifted galaxies in the universe from our perspective. Most galaxies are redshifted because the expansion of the universe stretches the intervening light and increases its wavelength, making it redder.
The Andromeda Galaxy has substantially more stars than the Milky Way. The latest estimate, made with images taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope, puts Andromeda’s number of stars at about 1012 (one trillion) stars. Despite the smaller number of stars, the Milky Way may in fact be the more massive of the two, due to a halo of dark matter. Dark matter is invisible matter that interacts with traditional matter only through its gravitational attraction.
The Local Group is itself embedded within the Virgo Supercluster, which contains about 100 groups of galaxies similar in size to the Local Group, called clusters. The Local Group is moving towards the central cluster, called the Virgo Cluster, which has between 1300 and 2000 galaxies. The Virgo Supercluster as a whole is moving rapidly toward a cosmological feature called the Great Attractor, a localized concentration of tens of thousands of galaxies between 150 million and 250 million light-years apart. On the grandest scale, the universe is expanding and each galaxy will eventually fall apart.
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