A large international team of astronomers and astrophysicists has found evidence showing that the Small Magellanic Cloud is not a single galaxy—it is actually two, one behind the other. The group has written a paper describing their work and posted it to the arXiv preprint server.

A large international team of astronomers and astrophysicists has found evidence showing that the Small Magellanic Cloud is not a single galaxy—it is actually two, one behind the other. The group has written a paper describing their work and posted it to the arXiv preprint server.

The Magellanic Clouds have for many years been known as two irregular dwarf galaxies that can be seen as appearing very close to one another in the southern celestial hemisphere. They have also been named individually as the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, based on their sizes. In the late 1980s, some evidence arose suggesting that the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) was not one, but two dwarf galaxies. In this new effort, the researchers have found more evidence, showing that the SMC is indeed two small dwarf galaxies.

  • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
    1·
    11 months ago

    From the article…

    The research team also calculated that the closer of the two galaxies is approximately 199,000 light years away, while the more distant of the pair is approximately 215,000 light years away.

    I find it really interesting that there’s only 16,000 light years separating them, considering they are two separate galaxies.