Our galaxy isn’t orbiting a single object the way Earth orbits the Sun. Instead, the Milky Way is locked in a gravitational dance with its nearest large neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, while simultaneously being pulled through space by the combined gravity of enormous structures containing hundreds of thousands of galaxies. The answer depends on what scale you’re looking at.
The Milky Way and Andromeda Share a Center of Gravity
At the most immediate level, the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy orbit a shared center of mass, much like two figure skaters spinning around each other while clasped at the hands. Andromeda sits about 2.5 million light-years away and is approaching us at roughly 110 kilometers per second. These two galaxies are by far the largest members of a small collection called the Local Group, which contains more than 80 galaxies but is gravitationally dominated by this pair.
For decades, astronomers assumed the two galaxies were on a direct collision course, with a merger expected in about 5 billion years. But a 2025 study in Nature Astronomy complicated that picture considerably. By accounting for uncertainties in the positions, motions, and masses of all the galaxies in the Local Group, the researchers found roughly a 50% chance that no merger will happen within the next 10 billion years. The sideways motion of Andromeda relative to us, once thought to be small, may be large enough that the two galaxies swing past each other rather than collide. If they do merge, the result would be a massive elliptical galaxy sometimes nicknamed “Milkomeda.”
The Pull of Larger Structures
Zoom out further and the Local Group is just a tiny suburb. It sits on the outskirts of the Virgo Cluster, a dense collection of thousands of galaxies about 50 million light-years away. And the Virgo Cluster is itself part of something much bigger: the Laniakea Supercluster, a sprawling web of roughly 100,000 galaxies stretching across 500 million light-years. The Milky Way, along with everything else in Laniakea, is flowing toward its gravitational center.
That center roughly corresponds to a region astronomers call the Great Attractor, located in the direction of the constellation Norma. It’s hard to study directly because it sits behind the dense plane of our own galaxy, which blocks visible light. Estimates place it somewhere between 130 and 200 million light-years from us, with a mass that could be equivalent to a million billion Suns or more. The Milky Way sits perhaps 30 to 65 million light-years from the densest part of this region.
But the Great Attractor isn’t a single thing pulling us toward it like a cosmic drain. A 2024 study in The Open Journal of Astrophysics found that mass within about 500 million light-years of us accounts for only around 72% of the Local Group’s total motion, and even that pull is offset by about 38 degrees from where the Great Attractor sits. The researchers concluded that no single attractor explains our motion through space. Instead, the Great Attractor is better understood as one knot in a vast web of gravitational influences, some of them far more distant.
How Fast We’re Actually Moving
The most useful way to measure our galaxy’s total motion is to compare it against the cosmic microwave background, the faint radiation left over from the early universe that fills all of space nearly uniformly. Relative to this backdrop, the Milky Way is moving at about 620 kilometers per second, or roughly 1.4 million miles per hour. That speed reflects the sum of every gravitational tug on us: Andromeda pulling from one direction, the Virgo Cluster from another, the Great Attractor region from yet another, and structures even farther away contributing their share.
This motion isn’t an orbit in the traditional sense. You won’t find the Milky Way tracing a neat ellipse around any of these structures. The expansion of the universe is stretching space between galaxy clusters at the same time gravity is pulling them together, creating complex flows rather than clean circular paths. Within Laniakea, galaxies stream along gravitational “rivers” toward denser regions, but Laniakea itself may not be a permanently bound structure. Over billions of years, the expansion of space could pull its outer members apart.
A Layered Picture
Think of it as nesting scales of motion happening simultaneously. The Milky Way orbits a shared center of gravity with Andromeda over billions of years. That pair, along with the rest of the Local Group, flows toward the Virgo Cluster. The Virgo Cluster and its neighbors stream toward the core of the Laniakea Supercluster. And Laniakea itself may be drifting toward even larger concentrations of mass that astronomers are still mapping. In 2020, a team at the University of Hawaiʻi identified structures beyond Laniakea that extend the picture further, suggesting our supercluster connects to an even larger cosmic framework.
So the short answer is that the Milky Way doesn’t orbit any single object. It participates in gravitational relationships at every scale, from its partnership with Andromeda to the collective pull of structures spanning hundreds of millions of light-years. At each level, the motion is real and measurable, but none of it looks like the tidy orbit of a planet around a star.