Familiar astronomical object may be two galaxies, not one

The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), a hazy blob in the night sky easily visible to people in the Southern Hemisphere, has long been considered a lone dwarf galaxy close to the Milky Way. But a study posted online this month , and accepted by The Astronomical Journal , suggests the familiar site is not a single body, but two, with one behind the other as viewed from Earth. By tracking the movements of clouds of gas within the SMC and the young stars recently formed within them, astronomer Claire Murray of the Space Telescope Science Institute and her colleagues have found evidence of two stellar nurseries thousands of light-years apart. If confirmed, the reassessment will likely amplify calls from an increasing number of astronomers to change the SMC’s name and that of its neighbor, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Sixteenth century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, after whom the galaxies are named, was not an astronomer, did not discover them, and is recorded as having murdered and enslaved Indigenous people during his first-ever circumnavigation of the globe. As a result, astronomer Mia de los Reyes of Amherst College called for renaming the SMC and LMC in an opinion piece for Physics magazine in September. The idea has since “gotten a lot of informal support,” she says. The two Magellanic clouds are in the gravitational sway of the much larger Milky Way and are on course to pass through it in the future....
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news