Flowing Rivers Of Stars Link Magellanic Clouds Around Milky Way Galaxy

Scientists revealed they discovered two large bridges of stars linking the two dwarf galaxies called the Magellanic Clouds that orbit the Milky Way Galaxy.

Science News For Students has reported their findings last November 4, 2016, to the scientific community, the research team headed by Vasily Belokurov, an astrophysicist of Cambridge University, UK, said this discovery will help astronomers understand how galaxies interact with each other and how heavenly bodies behave at the perimeter of our Milky Way Galaxy.

Visual information about these "rivers of stars" were generated by data obtained by the Gaia spacecraft, a satellite launched to pinpoint the location of a billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. From the new data, Belokurov's team managed to track a stream of old "variable stars" - stars that shine brightly, then dim afterward - moving outwards from the small Magellanic Cloud going to the large Megellanic Cloud.

The data also showed a second stream of stars, this one made up of young, hot stars, also connecting the two Magellanic Clouds.

At first, astronomers thought the two clouds were not connected. But in the 1980s, scientists detected a stream of hydrogen gas interacting between the two galaxies. The data from the Gaia satellite confirmed this connection finally.

These celestial bridges of stars largely explain how galaxies interact and how some of them are born. New research reported by the Astrophysical Journal indicated that our Milky Way Galaxy also is a "big celestial bully" because it pilfered stars from neighboring galaxies like the Sagittarius Galaxy, another dwarf galaxy orbiting our Milky Way located 300,000 light years from Earth.

Motherboard Vice has learned that Marion Decricx, a graduate student of the Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, did a simulation with her adviser about the behavior of stars.

The data they collected indicated that our Milky Way Galaxy has been yanking stars from the Sagittarius Galaxy every time it flies by on its route around our galaxy. This push and pull behavior explains how galaxies grow or contract over millennia.