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The Small Magellanic Cloud is a nearby extragalactic nebula that is very familiar to astronomers — or so they thought . fresh research suggest that the satellite galaxy of theMilky Way , locate around 199,000 light - geezerhood from Earth , seems to have been hiding a secret : It ’s in reality two beetleweed , one behind the other .
To make the breakthrough , a team go byClaire Murray , an uranologist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland , tracked the trend of gasolene clouds and young stars being turn out within them around the Small Magellanic Cloud . They get that the small galaxy , which is around 18,900 easy - years wide ( or less than a fifth of the width of theMilky Way ) , contains two distinct stellar nursery thousands of light - age apart .
The Small Magellanic Cloud as seen in infrared by the VISTA telescope.
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The research has been accepted for issue in The Astrophysical Journal and is usable as a preprint viaarXiv .
A ‘trainwreck of a galaxy
Both the Small Magellanic Cloud and the big Magellanic Cloud are dwarf galaxy that are gravitationally bind to the Milky Way and are being steady draw toward our galaxy for a hit and merger in the far future .
While the Large Magellanic Cloud has a disc - like physical body similar to that of the Milky Way , the Small Magellanic Cloud is more maverick . The Small Magellanic Cloud has only one - third the pile of the declamatory midget galaxy , which has a mint tantamount to around 7 billion times that ofthe sun .
Although the little Magellanic Cloud was previously thought to consist of multiple components , it is passably obscure by interstellar cloud of accelerator pedal and dust , meaning these features have been hard to distinguish .
Murray has previously determined that the Small Magellanic Cloud is a " trainwreck " of a dwarf extragalactic nebula , full of gas disrupt by gravitative interactions with the Milky Way and the with child Magellanic Cloud . For the raw investigating of the Small Magellanic Cloud , she and her fellow worker whizz along in onradio wavesemitted by H gas in the midget galaxy using the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder radio scope , which make up 36 saucer feeler . The squad followed up these observations by using theEuropean Space Agency ’s ( ESA ) Gaia ballistic capsule , which is currentlybuilding a 3D mapof stars in the Milky Way , to cover the speed and direction of K of stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud that are young than 10 million days old .
wreak with the assumption that these new stars are moving in continuative with the big cloud of gasolene that birthed them , the researchers spotted two distinct superstar - have patches of gas and debris . The two clouds have different copiousness of " metals , " mean elements heavier than hydrogen or atomic number 2 , and one swarm seems to be more removed from Earth than the other , though their exact separation is n’t yet clear .
One mystery that researchers trust to ravel out is whether the two objects have been drawn together by sobriety or if one consists of gas that has been rip free of the other by gravitative fundamental interaction with the Large Magellanic Cloud .
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One piece of evidence that favors the former explanation is that both clouds seem to have interchangeable pot ; if one was torn from the other , it would be reasonable to assume that the daughter swarm would be smaller than its progenitor . If the two clouds are unrelated , this would imply that the minuscule Magellanic Cloud is two celestial objects and not one .
That ’s the case , the Small Magellanic Cloud may take a new name . In fact , many scientists are already in favor of this ; the gnome galax is currently named after 15th/16th - century explorerFerdinand Magellan , who did not notice either the Large Magellanic Cloud or the modest Magellanic Cloud and is responsible for for the death and enslavement of thousands of Indigenous people as he circumnavigated the globe .
