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    Our closest neighboring galaxy may be being torn apart

    April 16, 2025, Categories  Uncategorized

    Velocities of massive star candidates within the SMC shown as vectors. The colors of the arrows represent the direction of motion. Relative to the LMC, located at the bottom left of the image, most red arrows show movement towards the LMC, whereas most light blue arrows show movement away from the LMC, suggesting they are being pulled apart. (credit: Satoya Nakano)

    Our closest neighboring galaxy may be being torn apart. Is the nearest galaxy to ours being torn apart? Research suggests so. A team led by Satoya Nakano and Kengo Tachihara at Nagoya University in Japan has revealed new insights into the motion of massive stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), a small galaxy neighboring the Milky Way...

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    Hubble Sees Aftermath of Galaxy’s Scrape with Milky Way

    November 15, 2024, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    A whitish, whirlpool-like galaxy at middle of top edge, and a tadpole-shaped structure sweeps from left to right across lower half. A label pointing to outer, left of galaxy reads “Earth.” Faint, purple haze labeled “Milky Way Halo” surrounds galaxy and stretches to graphic’s edges. The tadpole-shaped object is the Large Magellanic Cloud, or LMC, with its own halo and streaming tail. Semi-circular, progressively darker layers of purple labeled “LMC Halo” surround the LMC, which appears roughly circular, with a central, light-yellow bar. Cloud-like features sprinkled with white specks surround this bar. Trailing the LMC is a large, tail-like feature labeled “Stream.” At the bottom left corner of graphic are several small, bright points of light labeled “Quasars.” Three light blue lines point from the label “Earth” through the LMC’s halo, and to three corresponding quasars. At the bottom, right corner is the label “Artist’s Concept.”
    This artist’s concept shows the Large Magellanic Cloud, or LMC, in the foreground as it passes through the gaseous halo of the much more massive Milky Way galaxy. The encounter has blown away most of the spherical halo of gas that surrounds the LMC, as illustrated by the trailing gas stream reminiscent of a comet’s tail. Still, a compact halo remains, and scientists do not expect this residual halo to be lost. The team surveyed the halo by using the background light of 28 quasars, an exceptionally bright type of active galactic nucleus that shines across the universe like a lighthouse beacon. Their light allows scientists to “see” the intervening halo gas indirectly through the absorption of the background light...
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    New study shows Small Magellanic Cloud is actually Two Smaller Galaxies

    December 28, 2023, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Top: Intensity-weighted mean velocity map of the SMC from Pingel et al (2022). The single contour indicates an Hi column density of 15×1020⁢cm−2. The center of the SMC used in this work (defined based on the stellar populations observed by Gaia Zivick et al, 2021) is marked with a magenta cross. Spatial bins are overlaid and identified with numbers. Bottom: The average Hi brightness temperature spectra (Tb⁢(vr)) profiles from spatial bins marked at left (black). Each panel includes shaded gray envelopes denoting the 16th through 84th percentile of the Tb⁢(vr) within each spatial bin. We observe that the radial velocity structure of Hi emission features multiple, distinct velocity peaks (and typically two, dominant components). Credit: arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2312...
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    ‘Black Hole Police’ discover a Dormant Black Hole outside our Galaxy

    July 19, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

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    A team of international experts, renowned for debunking several black hole discoveries, have found a stellar-mass black hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighbour galaxy to our own. “For the first time, our team got together to report on a black hole discovery, instead of rejecting one,” says study leader Tomer Shenar. Moreover, they found that the star that gave rise to the black hole vanished without any sign of a powerful explosion. The discovery was made thanks to six years of observations obtained with the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO’s) Very Large Telescope (VLT).

    A team of international experts, renowned for debunking several black hole discoveries, have found a stellar-mass black hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighbour galaxy to our own...

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