• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

The LMC Just Made A Close Approach To Our Galaxy, And Hubble Saw The Aftermath

November 15, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

The Hubble Space Telescope has taken a look at the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a nearby dwarf galaxy, being stripped of its gas by the far more massive Milky Way.

The LMC is a dwarf galaxy, relatively close to the Earth (in galactic terms) at around 160,000 light years away. That may sound distant, but to put it into perspective, it takes up an area around 20 times the diameter of the full Moon in the Southern Hemisphere’s night sky. 

Advertisement

The galaxy is especially interesting, as many astronomers believe that it is not in orbit around our galaxy, but just passing by. According to this idea, the LMC has likely just made its closest approach to the Milky Way, and has come out worse for wear following its encounter.

The team, including astronomers from NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), attempted to get a look at the halo of gas surrounding the LMC by using 28 quasars behind it. This involved observing ultraviolet light using the Hubble Space Telescope, the only space telescope to see these wavelengths. 

The bright light given off by distant quasars powered by supermassive black holes passes through the cloud, and light of specific wavelengths is absorbed as it passes through the intervening gas. By analyzing the wavelengths of the light that traversed interstellar space and ended up at Hubble, the team built up a picture of the LMC.

Artist concept of the close encounter

Artist’s concept of the close encounter between the Milky Way and the LMC.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, Ralf Crawford (STScI)

The team found that the galaxy’s halo was extremely small at around 50,000 light-years across. While this sounds gigantic, it’s about 10 times smaller than astronomers would expect for galaxies of comparable mass. 

Advertisement

“I like to think of the Milky Way as this giant hairdryer, and it’s blowing gas off the LMC as it comes into us,”  Andrew Fox of ESA and principal investigator on the observations explained in a statement. “The Milky Way is pushing back so forcefully that the ram pressure has stripped off most of the original mass of the LMC’s halo. There’s only a little bit left, and it’s this small, compact leftover that we’re seeing now.”

Despite being a little lighter for its encounter, the LMC battles on, and will likely still go on to form new stars.

“The LMC is a survivor,” Fox added. “Even though it’s lost a lot of its gas, it’s got enough left to keep forming new stars. So new star-forming regions can still be created. A smaller galaxy wouldn’t have lasted – there would be no gas left, just a collection of aging red stars.”

The team believes the LMC is safe for now. Having just moved past its closest approach, it is unlikely that the rest of the dwarf galaxy’s halo will be stolen, while the gas already stripped will eventually fall to the Milky Way. Further observations are planned on a different region of the LMC.

Advertisement

The study is accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, and is posted to pre-print server arXiv.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Cricket-Manchester test likely to be postponed after India COVID-19 case
  2. EU to attend U.S. trade meeting put in doubt by French anger
  3. Soccer-West Ham win again, Leicester and Napoli falter
  4. Was Jesus A Hallucinogenic Mushroom? One Scholar Certainly Thought So

Source Link: The LMC Just Made A Close Approach To Our Galaxy, And Hubble Saw The Aftermath

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • What Is Actually Happening When You Get Blackout Drunk? An Ethically Dubious Experiment Found Out
  • Koalas Get A Shot At Survival As World-First Chlamydia Vaccine Gets Approval
  • We Could See A Black Hole Explode Within 10 Years – Unlocking The Secrets Of The Universe
  • Denisovan DNA May Make Some People Resistant To Malaria
  • Beware The Kellas Cat? This “Cryptid” Turned Out To Be Real, But It Wasn’t What People Thought
  • “They Simply Have A Taste For The Hedonists Among Us”: Festival Mosquito Study Has Some Bad News
  • What Is The Purpose Of Those Lines On Your Towels?
  • The Invisible World Around Us: How Can We Capture And Clean The Air We Breathe?
  • 85-Million-Year-Old Dinosaur Eggs Dated Using “Atomic Clock For Fossils” For The First Time
  • Why Shouldn’t You Kiss Babies? New Study Shows Even Healthy Newborns Can Become Severely Ill With RSV
  • Earth Has A New Quasi-Moon – And It Has Probably Been Around For Decades
  • Want To Kill Your Prey? Do It Feather-Legged Lace Weaver Spider Style And Vomit All Over Them
  • IFLScience The Big Questions: Are We In The Anthropocene?
  • The Wildfire Paradox Affecting 440 Million People Has As Worrying A Solution As You’d Expect
  • AI May Infringe On Your Rights And Insult Your Dignity (Unless We Do Something Soon)
  • How Do You Study Cryptic Species? We’re Finally Lifting The Lid On The World’s Least Understood Mammals
  • Once-In-A-Decade Close Encounter With Hazardous Asteroid 2025 FA22 Approaches
  • With 229 Pairs, This Beautiful Animal Has The Highest Number Of Chromosomes Of Any Animal
  • “An Unimaginable Breakthrough”: Loudest-Ever Gravitational Wave Collision Proves Stephen Hawking Correct
  • Exciting Martian Mudstone Has Features That Might Be Considered Biosignatures
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version