Few people know that our galaxy has a satellite that revolves in its orbit like the moon follows the earth, this satellite is called the Great Magellanic Cloud and is 160 thousand light years away from our galaxy. A turn equals about 10 trillion kilometers!

A galaxy that follows our galaxy

The Large Magellanic Cloud is an amazing celestial wonder for Southern Hemisphere residents, as they can easily spot it with the naked eye. It was called Thank you The 15th-century Portuguese astronomer and traveler Ferdinand Magellan wrote it down in his notes, and it later became known by his name.

In the past, astronomers thought the “Large Magellanic Cloud” was part of our galaxy and separated from it, but now it’s a stand-alone galaxy with a clear rod-shaped nucleus at its center. It could have been a spiral galaxy similar to our galaxy, but smaller, and it entered orbit around our galaxy. Billions of years ago, it didn’t get away with it.

Reciprocal effect

In a newly published study In the journal “Galaxies,” astronomer Eugene Vassiliev of the University of Cambridge notes that the Large Magellanic Cloud’s influence on our galaxy and our galaxies is greater than scientists previously thought.

According to the study, considering its mass to be 10% to 20% of the mass of our galaxy (Milky Way), the Great Magellanic Cloud was impacted by our galaxy and it lost its spiral arms. Strong gravitational exchange with our galaxy.

Vasiliev believes An official statement to the “Universe Today” site The latest data from Gaia, a space probe launched by the European Space Agency that aims to create a sky map of nearly a billion stars, extends to the halo around the Milky Way. and the velocity of the stars, the halo of our galaxy.

Scientists in this range believe that these striped patterns are remnants of galaxies that merged with the Milky Way long ago. But apart from that, the new study finds that some of the distortion in those patterns was caused by the Large Magellanic Cloud when it passed by the Milky Way in the past.

Until now, the Large Magellanic Cloud has been a rich area of ​​study for astronomers around the world, especially because it contains a large number of star clouds, in which baby stars are being born at an unprecedented rate.