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This simple illustration of the region around the Milky Way
uses an embedded Flash visualisation. After loading click
within the window to interact, or click the "i" for help
on key commands.
Viewing it requires Flash 9.0 (late-ish revision) or later.
It's very slow since it's not using the graphics card for 3-d effects.
If you would like a
much faster version for your desktop that does, let me know.
The Local Group is not really a group, in the sense of an equilibrated set of galaxies within a common halo. Instead, as can be seen from the illustration, it consists of two main halos in close proximity, with a modest overdensity of galaxies surrounding these. The Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) are located at the centers of the two main halos, and each have their own complement of dwarf galaxies. Here disk galaxies are in cyan, dwarf ellipticals in red, dwarf irregulars in yellow, and dwarf spheroidals in orange. --Mark Fardal
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| Created using s2web from the S2PLOT package. See Fluke, C.J., Barnes, D.G., Jones, N.T., 2008, "Interchanging Interactive 3-d graphics for Cosmology", submitted to PASA, Oct 2008. Also refer to the S2PLOT web pages, specifically the details on s2web. | |