The Milky Way. This image is constructed from data from the ESA's Gaia mission that's mapping over one billion of the galaxy's stars. Image Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC
Astronomers often use the Milky Way as a standard for studying how galaxies form and evolve. Since we’re inside it, astronomers can study it in detail with advanced telescopes. By examining it in different wavelengths, astronomers and astrophysicists can understand its stellar population, its gas dynamics, and its other characteristics in far more detail than distant galaxies.
However, new research that examines 101 of the Milky Way’s kin shows how it differs from them.
Near the outskirts of the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy roughly 200 000 light-years from Earth, lies the young star cluster NGC 602, which is featured in this new image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. This image includes data from Webb’s NIRCam (Near-InfraRed Camera) and MIRI (Mid-InfraRed Instrument). Image Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, P. Zeidler, E. Sabbi, A. Nota, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb)
This stunning image of a star cluster in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) is more than just a pretty picture. It’s part of a scientific effort to understand star formation in an environment different from ours. The young star cluster is called NGC 602, and it’s very young, only about 2 or 3 million years old.
The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are well known satellite galaxies of the Milky Way but there are more. It is surrounded by at least 61 within 1.4 million light years (for context the Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 million light years away) but there are likely to be more. A team of astronomers have been hunting for more companions using the Subaru telescope and so far, have searched just 3% of the sky. To everyone’s surprise they have found nine previously undiscovered satellite galaxies, far more than expected.
The Small Magellanic Cloud is one of the highlights of the southern sky. It can be seen with the naked eye. But it is obscured by clouds of interstellar gas and dust, which makes it hard for optical telescopes to get a good look at it. This image, taken with the ESO's VISTA. is the biggest-ever image of the SMC, and shows millions of stars. Credit: ESO/VISTA VMC
The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) galaxy. Credit: ESA/VISTA
The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) is one of the Milky Way’s nearest companions (along with the Large Magellanic Cloud.) It’s visible with the naked eye in the southern hemisphere. A new image from the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) has peered through the clouds that obscure it and given us our biggest image ever of the dwarf galaxy.
The SMC contains several hundred million stars, is about 7,000 light years in diameter, and is about 200,000 light years away. It’s one of the most distant objects that we can see with the naked eye, and can only be seen from the southern hemisphere (and the lowest latitudes of the northern hemisphere.)
The Small Magellanic Cloud is located in the Tucana constellation (The Toucan) in the southern hemisphere. The SMC is shown in green outline around the word ‘Tucana’. Also shown are NGC 104 and NGC 362, unrelated objects that are much closer to Earth. Image: ESO, IAU and Sky & Telescope
The SMC is a great target for studying how stars form because it’s so close to Earth, relatively speaking. But the problem is, its detail is obscured by clouds of interstellar gas and dust. So an optical survey of the Cloud is difficult.
But the ESO’s VISTA instrument is ideal for the task. VISTA is a near-infrared telescope, and infrared light is not blocked by the dust. VISTA was built at the ESO’s Paranal Observatory, in the Atacama Desert in Chile where it enjoys fantastic observing conditions. VISTA was designed to perform several surveys, including the Vista Magellanic Survey.
Explore the Zoomable image of the Small Magellanic Cloud. (You won’t be disappointed.)
The VISTA Magellanic Survey is focused on 3 main objectives:
The study of stellar populations in the Magellanic Clouds
The history of star formation in the Magellanic Clouds
The three-dimensional structure of the Magellanic Clouds
An international team led by Stefano Rubele of the University of Padova has studied this image, and their work has produced some surprising results. VISTA has shown us that most of the stars in this image are much younger than stars in other neighbouring galaxies. It’s also shown us that the SMC’s morphology is that of a warped disc. These are only early results, and there’s much more work to be done analyzing the VISTA image.
VISTA inside its enclosure at Paranal. VISTA has a 4.1 meter mirror, and its job is to survey large sections of the sky at once. In the background is the ESO’s Very Large Telescope. Image: G. Hüdepohl (atacamaphoto.com)/ESO
As the authors say in their paper, the SMC is a great target for study because of its “rich population of star clusters, associations, stellar pulsators, primary distance indicators, and stars in shortlived evolutionary stages.” In a way, we’re fortunate to have the SMC so close. But studying the SMC was difficult, until the VISTA came online with its infrared capabilities.
VISTA saw first light on December 11th, 2009. It’s time is devoted to systematic surveys of the sky. In its first five years, it has undertaken large surveys of the entire southern sky, and also studied small patches of the sky to discern extremely faint objects. The leading image in this article is from the Vista Magellanic Survey, a survey covering 184 square degrees of the sky, taking in both the Small Magellanic Cloud and the Large Magellanic Cloud, and their environment.
This image shows the two "bridges" that connect the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. The white line traces the bridge of stars that flows between the two dwarf galaxies, and the blue line shows the gas. Image: V. Belokurov, D. Erkal and A. Mellinger
Astronomers have finally observed something that was predicted but never seen: a stream of stars connecting the two Magellanic Clouds. In doing so, they began to unravel the mystery surrounding the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). And that required the extraordinary power of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia Observatory to do it.
The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (LMC and SMC) are dwarf galaxies to the Milky Way. The team of astronomers, led by a group at the University of Cambridge, focused on the clouds and on one particular type of very old star: RR Lyrae. RR Lyrae stars are pulsating stars that have been around since the early days of the Clouds. The Clouds have been difficult to study because they sprawl widely, but Gaia’s unique all-sky view has made this easier.
Small and Large Magellanic Clouds over Paranal Observatory Credit: ESO/J. Colosimo
The Mystery: Mass
The Magellanic Clouds are a bit of a mystery. Astronomers want to know if our conventional theory of galaxy formation applies to them. To find out, they need to know when the Clouds first approached the Milky Way, and what their mass was at that time. The Cambridge team has uncovered some clues to help solve this mystery.
The team used Gaia to detect RR Lyrae stars, which allowed them to trace the extent of the LMC, something that has been difficult to do until Gaia came along. They found a low-luminosity halo around the LMC that stretched as far as 20 degrees. For the LMC to hold onto stars that far away means it would have to be much more massive than previously thought. In fact, the LMC might have as much as 10 percent of the mass that the Milky Way has.
The Large Magellanic Cloud. Image: Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57110
The Arrival of the Magellanic Clouds
That helped astronomers answer the mass question, but to really understand the LMC and SMC, they needed to know when the clouds arrived at the Milky Way. But tracking the orbit of a satellite galaxy is impossible. They move so slowly that a human lifetime is a tiny blip compared to them. This makes their orbit essentially unobservable.
But astronomers were able to find the next best thing: the often predicted but never observed stellar stream, or bridge of stars, stretching between the two clouds.
A star stream forms when a satellite galaxy feels the gravitational pull of another body. In this case, the gravitational pull of the LMC allowed individual stars to leave the SMC and be pulled toward the LMC. The stars don’t leave at once, they leave individually over time, forming a stream, or bridge, between the two bodies. This action leaves a luminous tracing of their path over time.
The astronomers behind this study think that the bridge actually has two components: stars stripped from the SMC by the LMC, and stars stripped from the LMC by the Milky Way. This bridge of RR Lyrae stars helps them understand the history of the interactions between all three bodies.
A Bridge of Stars… and Gas
The most recent interaction between the Clouds was about 200 million years ago. At that time, the Clouds passed close by each other. This action formed not one, but two bridges: one of stars and one of gas. By measuring the offset between the star bridge and the gas bridge, they hope to narrow down the density of the corona of gas surrounding the Milky Way.
Mystery #2: The Milky Way’s Corona
The density of the Milky Way’s Galactic Corona is the second mystery that astronomers hope to solve using the Gaia Observatory.
The Galactic Corona is made up of ionised gas at very low density. This makes it very difficult to observe. But astronomers have been scrutinizing it intensely because they think the corona might harbor most of the missing baryonic matter. Everybody has heard of Dark Matter, the matter that makes up 95% of the matter in the universe. Dark Matter is something other than the normal matter that makes up familiar things like stars, planets, and us.
The other 5% of matter is baryonic matter, the familiar atoms that we all learn about. But we can only account for half of the 5% of baryonic matter that we think has to exist. The rest is called the missing baryonic matter, and astronomers think it’s probably in the galactic corona, but they’ve been unable to measure it.
A part of the Small Magellanic Cloud galaxy is dazzling in this image from NASA’s Great Observatories. The Small Magellanic Cloud is about 200,000 light-years way from our own Milky Way spiral galaxy. Credit: NASA.
Understanding the density of the Galactic Corona feeds back into understanding the Magellanic Clouds and their history. That’s because the bridges of stars and gas that formed between the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds initially moved at the same speed. But as they approached the Milky Way’s corona, the corona exerted drag on the stars and the gas. Because the stars are small and dense relative to the gas, they travelled through the corona with no change in their velocity.
But the gas behaved differently. The gas was largely neutral hydrogen, and very diffuse, and its encounter with the Milky Way’s corona slowed it down considerably. This created the offset between the two streams.
Eureka?
The team compared the current locations of the streams of gas and stars. By taking into account the density of the gas, and also how long both Clouds have been in the corona, they could then estimate the density of the corona itself.
When they did so, their results showed that the missing baryonic matter could be accounted for in the corona. Or at least a significant fraction of it could. So what’s the end result of all this work?
It looks like all this work confirms that both the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds conform to our conventional theory of galaxy formation.
An ultraviolet view of the Large Magellanic Cloud from Swift's Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope. Almost 1 million ultraviolet sources are visible in the image, which took 5.4 days of cumulative exposure to do. The wavelengths of UV shown in this picture are mostly blocked on Earth's surface. Credit: NASA/Swift/S. Immler (Goddard) and M. Siegel (Penn State)
Earth’s galactic next-door neighbors shine brighter than ever in new pictures taken by an orbiting telescope, focusing on ultraviolet light that is tricky to image from the surface.
The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) — the two largest major galaxies near our own, the Milky Way — were imaged in 5.4 days and 1.8 days of cumulative exposure time, respectively. These produced two gorgeous, high-resolution photos in a spot of the light spectrum normally invisible to humans.
“Prior to these images, there were relatively few UV observations of these galaxies, and none at high resolution across such wide areas, so this project fills in a major missing piece of the scientific puzzle,” stated Michael Siegel, lead scientist for Swift’s Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope at the Swift Mission Operations Center at Pennsylvania State University.
Science isn’t interested in these pictures — taken in wavelengths ranging from 1,600 to 3,300 angstroms, mostly blocked in Earth’s atmosphere — because of their pretty face, however. Ultraviolet light pictures let the hottest stars and star-forming areas shine out, while in visible light those hotspots are suppressed.
“With these mosaics, we can study how stars are born and evolve across each galaxy in a single view, something that’s very difficult to accomplish for our own galaxy because of our location inside it,” stated Stefan Immler, an associate research scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the lead of the SWIFT guest investigator program.
The Small Magellanic Cloud as seen by Swift’s Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope. This composite of 656 separate pictures has a cumulative exposure time of 1.8 days. Credit: NASA/Swift/S. Immler (Goddard) and M. Siegel (Penn State)
Although the galaxies are relatively small, they easily shine in our night sky because they’re so close to Earth — 163,000 light-years for the LMC, and 200,000 light years for the SMC.
The LMC is only about 1/10 of the Milky Way’s size, with 1% of the Milky Way’s mass. The punier SMC is half of LMC’s size with only two-thirds of that galaxy’s mass.
Immler revealed the large images — 160 megapixels for the LMC, and 57 megapixels for the SMC — at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Indianapolis on Monday (June 3.)
New image of NGC 346, the Small Magellanic Cloud. Credit: ESO
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It’s not Earth, Wind and Fire*, but light, wind and fire in this dramatic new image of the Small Magellanic Cloud (NGC 346) that will make you want to Keep Your Head to the Sky**. The light, wind and heat given off by massive, Mighty Mighty ** Shinging Star(s)** have dispersed the glowing gas within and around this star cluster, forming a surrounding wispy nebular structure that looks like a cobweb. As yet more stars form from lose matter in the area, they will ignite, scattering leftover dust and gas, carving out great ripples and altering the face of this lustrous object. But, That’s the Way of the World** in this open cluster of stars, that we just Can’t Hide Love** for.
The nebula containing this clutch of bright stars can really Sparkle **. It is known as an emission nebula, meaning that gas within it has been heated up by stars until the gas emits its own light, just like the neon gas used in electric store signs.
This image was taken with the Wide Field Imager (WFI) instrument at the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. Images like this help astronomers Turn It Into Something Good** by helping to chronicle star birth and evolution, while offering glimpses of how stellar development influences the appearance of the cosmic environment over time.
If you want more information about this image, you can Let Your Feelings Show** by visiting the ESO website.
*The band Earth, Wind and Fire is sometimes known as Elements of the Universe
** indicates song titles recorded by Earth, Wind and Fire
