Does the Milky Way orbit anything?

It seems like everything orbits something in space. Moons orbit planets. Planets orbit stars.

Stars orbit the centers of galaxies . But beyond that, things get a little harder to visualize. Do galaxies — and, specifically, the Milky Way — orbit anything? To answer that, we first need to know how orbits work.

Consider two objects orbiting each other. Those two bodies exert a gravitational pull on each other, keeping them bound together. The objects orbit their common center of mass — if you could shrink the system, the center of mass would be the point where you could balance it on your finger.

But in the case of the solar system , or Earth and the moon , one of the objects is much larger than the other. The center of mass ends up lying inside the larger body, so the larger object doesn't move much and the smaller object moves on a roughly circular path around the bigger one. At larger scales, things get a little more complicated.

Our galaxy is part of a collection of galaxies called the Local Group , which includes the Milky Way; the Andromeda galaxy; a smaller spiral galaxy called Triangulum; and several dwarf galaxies, including the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. The Milky Way and Andromeda are the two largest objects in the Local Group. Because their masses are comparable, the center of mass lies between the two galaxies, said Sangmo Tony Sohn , an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland.

There's nothing significantly larger than either ga.