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<\/p>\nThe largest satellite galaxies of the Milky Way \u2014 the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds \u2014 have been undergoing a treacherous interaction for billions of years. As the galactic pair are pulled toward the Milky Way, they are constantly orbiting each other and unraveling themselves, creating massive trails of gaseous debris. Yet, the galaxies have remained intact and continue to host star formation inside of them \u2014 something that has puzzled astronomers and physicists for years.<\/p>\n
However, using data from the joint NASA\/European Space Agency Hubble Space Telescope and the NASA\/Canadian Space Agency\/French Space Agency Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) spacecraft, a group of scientists have finally figured out how the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds continue to form stars despite their rigorous interaction.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of people were struggling to explain how these streams of material could be there. If this gas was removed from these galaxies, how are they still forming stars?\u201d said Dhanesh Krishnarao, assistant professor at Colorado College and the lead of the study.<\/p>\n
A massive shield of hot supercharged gas called a corona surrounds the Magellanic systems, enveloping the galaxies and preventing their gas supplies from being siphoned off by the nearby Milky Way \u2014 which allows them to host favorable environments for star formation.<\/p>\n
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The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. (Credit: ESO\/S. Brunier)<\/p>\n
\u201cGalaxies envelope [sic] themselves in gaseous cocoons, which act as defensive shields against other galaxies,\u201d said Andrew Fox of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, and co-investigator of the study.<\/p>\n
Scientists predicted the existence of the corona around the Large and Small Magellanic clouds several years ago but had no legitimate data to back up the prediction until the Krishnarao et al. study. Additionally, the corona is massive, stretching more than 100,000 light-years from the pair of galaxies \u2014 but is effectively invisible. Mapping out the corona required Krishnarao et al. to dig through 30 years of archival telescope data to obtain useful measurements for the corona.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Technology News (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});<\/p>\n \u201cWe discovered that if we included a corona in the simulations of the Magellanic Clouds falling onto the Milky Way, we could explain the mass of extracted gas for the first time. We knew that the Large Magellanic Cloud should be massive enough to have a corona,\u201d said Elena D\u2019Onghia, a co-investigator of the study at the University of Wisconsin\u2013Madison.<\/p>\n Researchers believe that the coronas of galaxies are a remnant of the primordial cloud of gas that collapsed to form the galaxy. This is not the first time a corona has been observed around a galaxy: coronas have been spotted around distant dwarf galaxies numerous times, but researchers have never been able to investigate and probe a corona in as much detail as the corona around the Magellanic galaxies.<\/p>\n The small size of dwarf galaxies makes both the coronas and the galaxies extremely hard to detect, which is one of the reasons why scientists have never been able to deeply investigate these galactic coronas before.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019re lots of predictions from computer simulations about what they should look like, how they should interact over billions of years, but observationally we can\u2019t really test most of them because dwarf galaxies are typically just too hard to detect,\u201d said Krishnarao.<\/p>\n \u201cBecause they are right on our doorstep, the Magellanic Clouds provide an ideal opportunity to study how dwarf galaxies interact and evolve.\u201d<\/p>\n