In the southerly hemisphere , attend up to the dark sky , you could see two nearby Galax urceolata . The two fuzzy splotches of light have been scream , by Western scientists , the Large and Small Magellanic Cloud . But what you are not visualize is that the Small Magellanic Cloud ( SMC ) looks like it is made of two smaller galaxy , raw observations argue .
So , how it is potential that a cosmic object that has been pick up by human for tens of thousands of years could turn out to be two things ? Well , the two trenchant structures are actually superpose on the line of sight . One part is 199,000 easy - years away and the other is 215,000 light - age . About 16,000 unaccented - years or 5 kiloparsecs asunder .
The new work is really base on some consideration from the 80s that suggested the SMC to be two objects , but only thanks to the most cutting - edge lookout , have researchers been able to establish this as a fact .
Using the European Space Agency’sGaia observatory , the team was able to estimate the speed of many mavin in the SMC . They also used the Galactic Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder survey to study the question of the Interstellar Medium ( ISM ) in these galaxies , as well as the APOGEE resume . The squad also reckon the chemic writing of these two structures . They are chemically distinct , another crucial piece of evidence that they are two different small galaxies .
Researchers found that the two systems have different velocities and that the dissipated stars are in the front galaxy . They know this because their light has less extinction : there is less gasoline between us and them . They can also estimate that the two components of the SMC have roughly the same mass . The SMC is interacting with the Large Magellanic Cloud , and both two ingredient start interacting with their bigger fellow 600 million years ago .
“ We find grounds that the SMC is composed of two structures with distinct leading and gaseous chemical paper . We construct a simple model that successfully reproduces the observations and show that the ISM of the SMC is arrange into two , superimposed , asterisk - forming systems with exchangeable flatulency mass class by ∼ 5 kpc along the line of view , ” the authors , conduct byDr Claire Murrayfrom the Space Telescope Science Institute , wrote .
This year , stargazer have called the outside community torename the Magellanic Cloudsgiven the colonial barbarity commit by Magellan . The fact that the Galax urceolata are now three and not two feels like the perfect opportunity to do this .
A paper discussing the results is take for issue in the Astrophysical Journal and is available atarXiv .
