Astronomers Verify The Collision Of Two Milky Way Satellite Galaxies

With the help of the recently revealed data from a novel, potent space telescope, astronomers at the University of Michigan (UM) have successfully revealed that the southeast area, or “Wing,” of the Small Magellanic Cloud is shifting away from the central body of that dwarf galaxy. This event offered the foremost definite proof that the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds just collided. The results of the latest study are accessible in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Sally Oey, Professor, Astronomy, UM, is the lead study author. Oey stated that one can essentially see that the Wing is its own distinct area, which is shifting away from the rest of the SMC. Along with a global team, Oey and Johnny Dorigo Jones, an undergraduate researcher, were engaged in studying the SMC for “runaway” stars, or stars that have been evicted from clusters within the SMC.

On a similar note, a novel research published this week in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society has revealed the proof for a big number of double supermassive black holes. These black holes are probably signs of gigantic black hole merging episodes. This verifies the present comprehension of cosmological evolution, which states that galaxies and their related black holes tend to unite over the time, forming larger & larger galaxies and black holes.

Astronomers at the University of Hertfordshire, along with a global team of scientists, observed radio maps of strong jet sources. These observations revealed the signs that would generally be found when looking at black holes, which are closely orbiting each other. The black holes are seen to structure a binary black hole before they join together. In this situation, both the black holes are orbiting around each other. Gravitational wave telescopes have been able to prove the merging of minor black holes since 2015.