• Shaken and Stirred: Putting the Local Group on a weighing scale • byNeel Kolhe| Feb 25, 2026 |Daily Paper Summaries|0 comments Title:Impact of merger histories on the timing argument estimate of the Local Group mass Authors:Istiak Akib, François Hammer, Yanbin Yang First Author’s Institution:Observatoire de Paris, Université PSL, CNRS, Place Jules Janssen 92195, Meudon, France Status:Published in A&A [openaccess] , available on arXiv Long live the two body problem • Our Milky Way galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy are the two most massive objects in our Local Group of loosely associated galaxies • Though it is dotted with other objects such as the Triangulum galaxy, the Large Magellanic cloud (LMC) and the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies are thousands of times more massive than them • An illustration of the Local Group can be seen in Figure 1 • The ’timing argument’, as astronomers refer to it, is a very simple and elegant proposition: Through cosmic time, if galaxies end up close enough in space, they would eventually start falling toward each other

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  • Title: Impact of merger histories on the timing argument estimate of the Local Group mass Authors: Istiak Akib, François Hammer, Yanbin Yang First Author’s Institution: Observatoire de Paris, Université PSL, CNRS, Place Jules Janssen 92195, Meudon, France Status: Published in A&A [open access] , available on arXiv Long live the two body problem? Our Milky Way galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy are the two most massive objects in our Local Group of loosely associated galaxies. Though it is dotted with other objects such as the Triangulum galaxy, the Large Magellanic cloud (LMC) and the Small Magel

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