LMC & SMC likely collided a few hundred million years ago - GAIA data evidence
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Originally Posted by phys.org University of Michigan
Together with an international team, Oey and undergraduate researcher Johnny Dorigo Jones were examining the SMC for "runaway" stars, or stars that have been ejected from clusters within the SMC. To observe this galaxy they were using a recent data release from Gaia, a new, orbiting telescope launched by the European Space Agency.
Gaia is designed to image stars again and again over a period of several years in order to plot their movement in real time. That way, scientists can measure how stars move across the sky.
"We've been looking at very massive, hot young stars—the hottest, most luminous stars, which are fairly rare," Oey said. "The beauty of the Small Magellanic Cloud and the Large Magellanic Cloud is that they're their own galaxies, so we're looking at all of the massive stars in a single galaxy."
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In looking at this data, the team also observed that all the stars within the Wing—that southeast part of the SMC—are moving in a similar direction and speed. This demonstrates the SMC and LMC likely had a collision a few hundred million years ago.
