Large galax like the Milky fashion do not drift the cosmos alone . Instead , they are hem in by many modest companion beetleweed . The largest orbiter of the Milky Way is prognosticate the Large Magellanic Cloud ( LMC ) , and it should be big enough to have its own satellites – but these satellites do n’t seem to be there .
A team of astronomers think they have worked out why . Some of the Milky Way ’s more than 50 satellite galaxies were actually stolen from the tumid Magellanic Cloud . allot to the study published in theMonthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society , two well - known galaxies called Carina and Fornax and four ultra - feeble dwarf galaxies were “ kidnapped ” by the Milky Way .
The Milky Way and the Large Magellanic Cloud are in a complex cosmic waltz that will eventually lead to them combine . The breakthrough that these dwarf beetleweed used to go to the LMC gives researchers new insights into this process .
“ The high phone number of midget dwarf galaxies seems to suggest the dark matter content of the LMC is quite large , think the milklike Way is undergoing the most massive merger in its chronicle , with the LMC , its partner , contribute in as much as one third of the spate in the Milky Way ’s grim subject halo – the halo of invisible material that fence our Galax urceolata , ” atomic number 82 author Ethan Jahn , a graduate researcher at UC Riverside , said in astatement .
The discipline used the sophisticated European Space Agency ’s Gaia , a space lookout station that is collecting the military position and speed of trillion of stars . With that , they were able to reconstruct the history of the system over the last billion years . In this picture , the Milky Way ’s gravitational puff took in the Large Magellanic Cloud along with its seven companions , admit the one from the study and the Small Magellanic Cloud , which is currently in a complex interaction with the LMC .
“ These results are an authoritative confirmation of our cosmogonical example , which predict that small gnome galaxies in the creation should also be ring by a population of small fainter galaxy companion , ” added team leader and atomic number 27 - author Laura Sales , an assistant prof of physics and astronomy at UC riverbank . “ This is the first time that we are capable to map the power structure of body structure formation to such faint and ultrafaint dwarfs . ”
The squad is now interested in good sympathy how dwarf wandflower companions shape their stars , whether or not this is related to how much dark affair they have , and how they differ from dwarf extragalactic nebula that formed around the Milky Way .
