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The Galaxy is non hanging alone in infinite — several dwarf galaxies are hovering nearby, and 1 of them has been a particular target of report for astronomers. Using a new space telescope, researchers from the University of Michigan have adamant that the Small Magellanic Cloud is flying autonomously at the seams later a collision millions of years in the past.

At a distance of well-nigh 200,000 light years, the Minor Magellanic Cloud (SMC) is visible from Earth's southern hemisphere. This dwarf galaxy is still vast compared with the calibration of Earth with a diameter of 7,000 light years and several hundred million stars. It's an irregular milky way, only astronomers have long suspected that hints of a primal bar structure mean it could take been a more ordered "barred screw galaxy" in the past. While studying stellar motion in the Small Magellanic Cloud, the Michigan team may have discovered why information technology'southward not a spiral galaxy anymore.

The team used the ESA's Gaia telescope to track 315 stars in the Modest Magellanic Cloud. Gaia is designed to image stars repeatedly over the form of several years to build a map of their location and motility. The Small Magellanic Cloud is an entirely cocky-contained galaxy, so Gaia has the capacity to follow all the meaning changes inside it. That makes it a perfect fashion to written report delinquent stars — those objects that get flung articulate of their homes by powerful events.

At that place are ii main mechanisms that eject stars from a galaxy. A supernova in a binary system can fling the remaining star away and produce a outburst of X-rays in the process. A close pass by an object with high gravity tin can as well slingshot a star out of a milky way. Gaia establish evidence of both in the Pocket-size Magellanic Deject. Nevertheless, information technology besides saw that a region of the SMC known every bit the Wing is moving away from the master body. Even so, all those stars are moving in the same direction.

Gurtina Besla, an astronomer at the University of Arizona contributed to the study. In the past, her squad modeled a suspected collision betwixt the SMC and the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is twice the size. The group predicted that a near miss would cause the Wing to fly off in a perpendicular direction. Meanwhile, a standoff would drag the Wing toward the Large Magellanic Cloud. That's what Gaia shows — the Wing is separating from the SMC and moving in toward the Big Magellanic Cloud.

The squad estimates that the two dwarf galaxies collided within the terminal several hundred million years, just in that location's still a lot to learn. With data from Gaia and other upcoming telescopes, nosotros'll be able to study this separation in unparalleled detail. We're lucky that the Small Magellanic Cloud is in our galactic neighborhood.

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