Large and Small Magellanic Clouds tagged posts

For billions of years, the Milky Way’s largest satellite galaxies—the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds—have followed a perilous journey. Orbiting one another as they are pulled in toward our home galaxy, they have begun to unravel, leaving behind trails of gaseous debris. And yet—to the puzzlement of astronomers—these dwarf galaxies remain intact, with ongoing vigorous star formation.

“A lot of people were struggling to explain how these streams of material could be there,” said Dhanesh Krishnarao, assistant professor at Colorado College. “If this gas was removed from these galaxies, how are they still forming stars?”

With the help of data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and a retired satellite called the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE), a t...

After slowly forming stars for the first few billion years of their lives, the Magellanic Clouds, near neighbors of our own Milky Way galaxy, have upped their game and are now forming new stars at a fast clip. This new insight into the history of the Clouds comes from the first detailed chemical maps made of galaxies beyond the Milky Way.

Named for explorer Ferdinand Magellan, who led the first European expedition to circumnavigate the globe, the Large and Small ...

The large and small Magellanic Clouds.
Credit: Andrew Lockwood

Two of the closest galaxies to the Milky Way – the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds – may have had a third companion, astronomers believe. Research published today describes how another “luminous” galaxy was likely engulfed by the Large Magellanic Cloud some 3 to 5 billion years ago. ICRAR Masters student Benjamin Armstrong, the lead author on the study, said most stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud rotate clockwise around the centre of the galaxy.

But, unusually, some stars rotate anti-clockwise. “For a while, it was thought that these stars might have come from its companion galaxy, the Small Magellanic Cloud,” Mr Armstrong said. “Our idea was that these stars might have come from a merger with another galaxy in the past.”

Mr...

This is a photo mosaic of an edge-on view of the Milky Way galaxy, looking toward the central bulge. Superimposed on it are radio-telescope images, colored pink, of the stretched, arc-shaped Magellanic Stream below the plane of the galaxy and the shredded, fragmented Leading Arm crossing the galaxy’s plane and extending above it. These gas clouds are being gravitationally pulled apart like taffy from the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds—satellite galaxies to our Milky Way—which appear as bright clumps within the gas. Credit: Illustration: D. Nidever et al., NRAO/AUI/NSF and A. Mellinger, Leiden-Argentine-Bonn (LAB) Survey, Parkes Observatory, Westerbork Observatory, Arecibo Observatory, and A. Feild (STScI) Science: NASA, ESA, and A. Fox (STScI)

On the outskirts of our galaxy, a cos...