The Sagittarius Dwarf elliptical galaxy is the third closest neighboring galaxy to the Milky Way, engaged in a polar orbit around it. It’s losing a stellar flux and is one of the few galaxies on a direct collision course with the Milky Way.
The Sagittarius Dwarf elliptical galaxy is the third closest neighboring galaxy to the Milky Way, where our solar system is located. Just 50,000 light-years away from the Milky Way’s core, the Sagittarius Galaxy is engaged in a polar orbit around the Milky Way, which is slowly eating it up. Even now, the Sagittarius Galaxy is losing a stellar flux, a filament that stretches around the Milky Way’s core like a wafer-thin ring. The Sagittarius Galaxy takes its name from the constellation in which it is located, Sagittarius.
Discovered in 1994, the Sagittarius Dwarf elliptical galaxy is only about 10,000 light-years in diameter, compared to the Milky Way’s diameter of 100,000 light-years. The Milky Way is estimated to be about 10,000 times more massive than the Sagittarius Galaxy. Until 2003 it was thought to be the closest galaxy to the Milky Way, although this point has recently been taken by the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy, also devoured by the Milky Way. Both galaxies, along with about eight others, are considered satellites of the Milky Way.
The Sagittarius Galaxy has about a billion stars, compared to the Milky Way’s 200-400 billion stars. Although it occupies a portion of the sky similar to a full moon, the Sagittarius galaxy is very faint because most of it is obscured by the galactic disk. Its central star cluster, M54, was discovered way back in 1778 by Charles Messier, making it the first extragalactic star cluster discovered, even though it took the astronomy community more than two centuries to realize.
The Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy is one of the few galaxies to be on a direct collision course with the Milky Way. It will pass through the galactic disk in about one hundred million years. But since the galaxies themselves are very diffuse, this will barely increase the incidence of stellar collisions.
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