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The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian will host two NASA Hubble Fellows beginning in the fall of 2022. Two outgoing Center for Astrophysics (CfA) scientists have also been selected as recipients of the fellowships.
May 4, 2021
The gravity of the Large Magellanic Cloud – one of the Milky Way’s satellite dwarf galaxies – is collecting stars behind it in a trail, like the wake from a boat, as it is traveling through our galaxy’s halo.
Astronomers observed distant stars in the faint halo surrounding our Milky Way galaxy and have now created a map of the halo, the first of its kind of these outermost parts of our galaxy. These new observations, the astronomers said in April 2021, show how the Large Magellanic Cloud – the Milky Way’s satellite galaxy – has created a wake, like a ship sailing through calm waters, as it is traveling through the halo of the Milky Way. The wake shows up as a distinct bright pathway of stars on the map, telling us that the Magellanic clouds are still traveling in their very first orbit around the Milky Way galaxy. And the wake itself may be made up of dark matter, dragging the stars along with it!
Astronomers have released a new map of the outermost region of our galaxy.
Known as a galactic halo, this area lies outside the swirling spiral arms that make up the Milky Way’s recognizable central disk, and is sparsely populated with stars.
Though the halo may appear mostly empty, scientists predict it contains a massive reservoir of dark matter, an invisible material thought to make up the bulk of all mass in the universe.
The new map, which appears as part of a paper in
Nature, reveals how a small galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud so-named because it is the larger of two dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way has sailed through the galactic halo like a ship through water, its gravity disturbing the halo and creating a wake in the stars behind it as it orbits the Milky Way some 130,000 light-years from Earth.