Masses for the Local Group and the Milky Way

Understand

We use the very large Millennium Simulation of the concordance $\Lambda$CDM cosmogony to calibrate the bias and error distribution of Timing Argument estimators of the masses of the Local Group and of the Milky Way.

• From a large number of isolated spiral-spiral pairs similar to the Milky Way/Andromeda system, we find the interquartile range of the ratio of timing mass to true mass to be a factor of 1.8, while the 5% and 95% points of the distribution of this ratio are separated by a factor of 5.7.
• Here we define true mass as the sum of the ``virial'' masses $M_{200}$ of the two dominant galaxies.
• For current best values of the distance and approach velocity of Andromeda this leads to a median likelihood estimate of the true mass of the Local Group of $5.27\times 10^{12}\msun$, or $\log M_{LG}/M_\odot = 12.72$, with an interquartile range of $[12.58, 12.83]$ and a 5% to 95% range of $[12.26, 13.01]$.