The Little Magellanic (SMC), a vague spot in the night sky easily visible to people in the southern hemisphere, has long been considered a lonely dwarf galaxy close to our Milky Way galaxy, part of the Magellanic Cloud constellation that also consists of the Great Magellanic Galaxy (LMC).
New research suggests that contrary to what scientists previously thought, Little Magellanic is not a lonely galaxy, but rather two galaxies, located one after the other from the angle at which they are seen from Earth.
A star cluster in the Great Magellanic galaxy, photo: NASA
The discovery was made by a team of researchers from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is engaged in, among other things, deciphering and studying the observations of the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes. The team leader, astronomer Claire Murray and her colleagues, found evidence suggesting that the small Magellanic Galaxy is actually two separate galaxies.
In a paper summarizing the team's research activities, Murray claimed that after examining and analyzing clouds of gas that form when stars form, it turned out that Little Magellanic includes two places where new stars form, thousands of light-years apart.
The team then used a computer model to figure out whether it was one giant object, or two separate, different objects. The model put the distance between the two clusters at 16,<> light-years, just over halfway between Earth and the midpoint of the Milky Way galaxy.
The core of the Milky Way galaxy, photo: NASA
Gravity of three galaxies
The result reached by the researchers is possible in two cases - the first is that it is a cluster of "space debris" created by the proximity of the Milky Way galaxy to the small Magellanic galaxy and its sister Magellanic. The strong gravitational pulls of the three could cause star clusters to get stuck between them.
However, the fact that the two clusters have the same mass increases the likelihood that they are not a single galaxy with a star cluster next to it, but rather two different and separate galaxies.
Milky Way Galaxy. Its gravity contributed to the creation of the Magellanic Clouds, photo: European Space Agency
Erase Ferdinand Magellan from the sky
If the current study is approved, there will be a growing possibility that the three southern galaxies will be given a new name and astronomers will drop the name "Magellan," which was given to them after explorer Ferdinand Magellan. The reason—Magellan and his crew murdered and enslaved many of the natives they met on their travels around the world.
It should be noted that besides the two galaxies, Magellan's name has been immortalized by the astronomical community in a variety of forms when craters on Mars and the Moon are named after him, NASA's mission to study Venus is named Magellan, there is a huge project of building a telescope in Chile named after him.
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