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The Milky Way, as part of the Local Cluster and Virgo Supercluster is moving towards the [[Great Attractor]]. The velocity of the Milky Way as it travels is around 552 km/s in respect to the photons of the cosmic microwave background.<ref>http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?bibcode=1993ApJ...419....1K</ref> Within the Local Cluster, the Andromeda galaxy itself is approaching us at 100 to 140 kilometers per second. The two galaxies will collide in some 3 to 4 billion years in the future, eventually forming a single, large [[elliptical galaxy]] over the course of a billion years.<ref>http://www.news.utoronto.ca/bin/000414b.asp</ref>
The Milky Way, as part of the Local Cluster and Virgo Supercluster is moving towards the [[Great Attractor]]. The velocity of the Milky Way as it travels is around 552 km/s in respect to the photons of the cosmic microwave background.<ref>http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?bibcode=1993ApJ...419....1K</ref> Within the Local Cluster, the Andromeda galaxy itself is approaching us at 100 to 140 kilometers per second. The two galaxies will collide in some 3 to 4 billion years in the future, eventually forming a single, large [[elliptical galaxy]] over the course of a billion years.<ref>http://www.news.utoronto.ca/bin/000414b.asp</ref>
==Age of the Milky Way==
Using the space-based observations of the [[microwave background radiation]], it is estimated the first stars were formed some 200 million years after the [[Big Bang]], and that the Milky Way were among one of the first galaxies in the early universe with an estimated age of 13.6 billion ±800 million years. This estimate was calculated by measuring the amount of [[beryllium]] in two stars within the cluster NGC 6397.<ref>http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0411699</ref> The two stars were found to be 13.4 billion years old. Using the estimated time it took for earlier stars to form and exploded, adding Beryllium to the interstellar medium, allowing for the type of stars found in NGC 6397 to form, approximately some 200 million years, they calculated the 13.6 billion year age for the galaxy.<ref>http://www.universetoday.com/2004/08/22/estimating-the-age-of-the-milky-way/</ref>
==Structure of the Milky Way==
==Structure of the Milky Way==