Are we limited to the local group?

Though we might think of our galaxy as crowded, most of it is actually empty space. Scaling up from there, the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies, along with about 50 dwarf galaxies, belong to our ‘local group’, which spans roughly 10 million light-years. In fact, humanity will only ever get to explore the local group.

Will humans ever go out of the Milky Way?

So, to leave our Galaxy, we would have to travel about 500 light-years vertically, or about 25,000 light-years away from the galactic centre. We’d need to go much further to escape the ‘halo’ of diffuse gas, old stars and globular clusters that surrounds the Milky Way’s stellar disk.

Can we see galaxies outside the local group?

On galaxy group scales and smaller, local gravity overpowers the universe’s expansion. However, powerful telescopes can see other galaxies outside of our group. If we wait long enough, the expansion of the universe will cause there to be fewer galaxies for powerful telescopes to look at.

Is the local group gravitationally bound?

Local Group: Two massive bright spirals, the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy (M31, NGC 224), dominate a gravitationally-bound group of around 40 galaxies known as the Local Group which spans a volume approximately 10 million light years in diameter.

What supercluster is the Milky Way in?

Virgo Supercluster
The Milky Way is part of the Local Group galaxy group (which contains more than 54 galaxies), which in turn is part of the Virgo Supercluster, which is part of the Laniakea Supercluster.

How fast is the Virgo Supercluster moving?

Our Supercluster, with a diameter measuring roughly 100 million light years or so, has a collective mass of about 1015 times the mass of the Sun. The Local Group, which is near one edge of the Local Supercluster, appears to be revolving around its center at about 400 km/s.