Dwarf Galaxy - Local Dwarfs

Local Dwarfs

There are many dwarf galaxies in the Local Group: these small galaxies frequently orbit around larger galaxies, such as the Milky Way, the Andromeda Galaxy and the Triangulum Galaxy. A 2007 paper has suggested that many dwarf galaxies were created by tidal forces during the early evolution of the Milky Way and Andromeda. Tidal dwarf galaxies are produced when galaxies collide and their gravitational masses interact. Streams of galactic material are pulled out away from the parent galaxies and the halos of dark matter that surround them.

The Milky Way has more than 20 known dwarf galaxies orbiting it, and recent observations have also led astronomers to believe the largest globular cluster in the Milky Way, Omega Centauri, is in fact the core of a dwarf galaxy with a black hole in its center, which was at some time absorbed by the Milky Way.

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