A mathematical group of youthful stars at the edge of the Milky Way has signaled to astronomers that a next galax collision has started bearing its former fruits . Our beetleweed will merge with two smaller one , the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds , over the next few billion year . And this fundamental interaction is already underway .
The research was print inThe Astrophysical Journaland presented at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Honolulu on January 8 . The clump is just 117 million long time old , very untried in maven terms , and is located on the outskirts of the Milky Way in a region near the Magellanic Stream , a river of gas stretching from the Magellanic Clouds towards our wandflower .
“ It ’s really , really far aside . It ’s further than any known immature stars in the Milky Way , which are typically in the disk . So right away , I was like , ‘ Holy hummer , what is this ? ’ ” primary spotter Adrian Price - Whelan , from the Flatiron Institute ’s Center for Computational Astrophysics , said in astatement . “ This is a puny cluster of star – less than a few thousand in total – but it has big implications beyond its local area of the Milky Way . ”
The observation were only possible with the incredible data from theEuropean Space Agency telescope Gaia . Gaia is sort out the position and velocity of 1.7 billion star . Price - Whelan searched for antecedently unknown clusters and found just this one . And it was further out than wait .
Together with colleagues , he studied the properties of the clustering and believed it was formed by a little morsel of the Magellanic Stream getting compress in the interaction between the three galaxy . Combining this hypothesis with the question data from Gaia , the team was able to forecast the distance to the Magellanic Stream , something very difficult to do precisely . They got an answer of 90,000 light - eld , half of the previous approximation .
“ If the Magellanic Stream is closer , especially the leading arm closest to our galaxy , then it ’s likely to be incorporated into the Milky Way preferably than the current model predicts , ” tell carbon monoxide - author Professor David Nidever from Montana State University . “ Eventually , that gas will turn over into fresh star in the Milky Way ’s disk . flop now , our wandflower is using up gas faster than its being replenished . This surplus gaseous state coming in will serve us fill again that reservoir and make certain that our galaxy continues to fly high and form new stars . ”
The work will ameliorate simulations of the next interaction between the galaxies , but the opening volley has been shot .
