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Astronomers Uncover a Crime of Galactic Proportions
As the Milky Way rises over the horizon at the European Southern Observatory, its companion galaxies also come into view. Credit: ESO/Y. Beletsky
A previously undetected heist of stars was uncovered by astronomers who were actually looking for why an unexpected amount of microlensing events were being seen around the outskirts of the Milky Way. Instead, they found the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) had been stealing stars from its neighbor, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), leaving behind a trail of stars. Although the crime was likely committed hundreds of milllions of years ago during a collision between the two galaxies, the new information is helping astronomers to understand the history of these two galaxies that are in our neighborhood.
“You could say we discovered a crime of galactic proportions,” said Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
The Large Magellanic Cloud almost got away with it, if it wasn’t for those meddling astronomers….
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Read the rest of Astronomers Uncover a Crime of Galactic Proportions (392 words)
© nancy for Universe Today, 2012. | Permalink | No comment |
Post tags: galaxies, Large Magellanic Cloud, milky way, Small Magellanic Cloud
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2012-10-29 11:43:53
Source: http://www.universetoday.com/98237/astronomers-uncover-a-crime-of-galactic-proportions/
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