Researchers think that two of the closest galaxy to the Milky Way , the Large and minuscule Magellanic Clouds ( LMC and SMC severally ) , were caught in a bit of a buffer breaking ball a few hundred million old age ago . Astronomers were study the movement of wizard in the SMC and discovered that part of the galaxy is moving away from the rest , a strong sign of a retiring hit .
The team used theEuropean Space Agency ’s Gaia telescopeto study the internal dynamic of this planet of the Milky Way . Gaia is designed to image stars again and again over several years . It is able of such exact observations that it can exercise out how much stars have moved , even in the SMC which is almost 200,000 faint - years from Earth .
The study , shortly to be published inThe Astrophysical Journal Letters , pore on monolithic genius that might have been ejected from the clusters where they formed . But the team discovered that genius from the southeasterly neighborhood of the small coltsfoot , known as the “ Wing ” , are all actuate away from the master body . Although models have previously suggest there was an interaction , this is the first unequivocal finding that show that the two Magellanic Clouds collided in late cosmic time .
“ This is really one of our exciting results . you could really see that the Wing is its own separate part that ’s move by from the residuum of the SMC , ” lead author Professor Sally Oey , from the University of Michigan , said in astatement . “ We ’ve been looking at very massive , hot young ace – the hottest , most luminous whizz , which are fairly rarified . The beauty of the Small Magellanic Cloud and the bombastic Magellanic Cloud is that they ’re their own galaxies , so we ’re take care at all of the monolithic stars in a single galax . ”
In 2012 , Colorado - source Dr Gurtina Besla and colleagues created amodel of potential interactionsthat could excuse the structure in the two small galax . Their example auspicate that if the Magellanic Clouds had directly collide in their past , the Wing should be moving toward the LMC . This is precisely what has been observed . The stars in the Wing are take to the woods the SMC at or so 64 kilometers ( 40 Swedish mile ) per secondly .
There are 59 small galaxy in the neighborhood of the Milky Way and dozen of them are confirmed satellite of our beetleweed . The Magellanic Clouds are the only ones visible to the naked eye , and while they are named after the sixteenth - century Lusitanian explorer Ferdinand Magellan , they ’ve been known about since prehistory in Africa , Australasia , and South America .
