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A team led by the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune, has discovered the first known system of its kind in the Magellanic Bridge.
The discovery was made using the eROSITA X-ray telescope.
The Magellanic Bridge is a stream of stars and gas connecting the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds.
It is made of material tidally stripped from the Small Magellanic Cloud during a close encounter some 200 to 300 million years ago.
The finding allows astronomers to study how close galactic encounters influence binary star formation and evolution.
The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are dwarf galaxies that orbit the Milky Way. When two galaxies pass close to each other, the gravitational pull of the larger one drags gas and stars out of the smaller one along a trailing stream — a tidal feature. The Magellanic Bridge is exactly that: a ribbon of gas and stars pulled out of the Small Magellanic Cloud during a close pass with the Large Magellanic Cloud roughly 200 to 300 million years ago. Although it is mostly gas, new stars have since formed inside it, which makes it a natural laboratory for studying star formation in an environment quite unlike either parent galaxy.
Simple Analogy: It is like a trail of dough pulled out between two lumps as they are drawn apart — thin, stretched, and made of material that came from one of them.
GS Paper 3 > Science and Technology: Developments and their Applications, Space
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Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, an autonomous research centre at Pune established by the University Grants Commission.
Two dwarf galaxies, the Large and the Small, that orbit the Milky Way.
The removal of gas and stars from a smaller galaxy by the gravitational pull of a larger one during a close encounter.
The second Lagrange point of the Sun-Earth system, a gravitationally stable location about 1.5 million km from Earth used for space observatories.