Beautiful Baby Stars Are Born At Our Galaxy's Edge

When very massive stars perish, they do not go peacefully--they blast themselves to pieces in the raging, fiery tantrum of a supernova explosion. When these heavy stars go supernova they throw their batch of freshly fused heavy atomic elements out into the space between stars. The first generation of stars were probably enormous--weighing-in at, perhaps, hundreds of times more than our Sun. They lived fast and died young. The heavier the star, the briefer its stellar existence. When the first stars blew themselves up in supernova fireworks, they hurled out the very first newly fused batch of heavy atomic elements into the Cosmos. These heavy atomic elements, or "metals" in the jargon of astronomers, are those that are heavier than hydrogen and helium.

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The Magellanic Clouds are two of the brightest and closest small satellite galaxies in orbit around our own large barred-spiral, the Milky Way. The two shapeless Clouds pour gas both behind them and ahead of them in a long streamer that is appropriately named the Magellanic Stream. The Magellanic Stream--a long ribbon of gas that extends almost half way around our Galaxy--does a rippling dance beyond the edge of the Milky Way. Most of the stream was torn from the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) about 2 billion years ago, but a smaller blob of it was created more recently from the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). In April 2014, a team of astronomers announced that they have detected bright new beautiful baby stars where the stream of Magellanic gas hits our own Galaxy--thus triggering the brilliant birthing of sparkling stars, while adding a fresh new glow to the Milky Way.

The LMC and SMC got their names because they were mistakenly thought to be clouds by the explorer Ferdinand Magellan (1480-1521)--and the two so-called "clouds" were named in his honor.

The LMC and SMC are nearby irregular, shapeless, small galaxies. The LMC is a mere 160,000 light-years distant, and the SMC is only a little further out at approximately 200,000 light-years away. For comparison, our entire Milky Way Galaxy is about 100,000 light-years across, and it is about three million light-years away from the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), another spiral, which is the nearest large galactic neighbor of the Milky Way.

The newfound, newborn stars discovered at our Galaxy's edge, were likely formed quite recently when the Magellanic gas collided with gas in our Milky Way. The baby stars provide a precious insight into processes that occurred in the primordial Universe, when small, gas-laden galaxies blasted into one another to eventually give rise to the large, majestic galaxies inhabiting the modern Universe--such as our own Milky Way and Andromeda.

"This is the one and only galaxy interaction we can model in very much detail. For more distant systems that interact, we don't have the wealth of information," noted Dr. Dana Casetti-Dinescu in the April 4, 2014 Scientific American. Dr. Casetti-Dinescu, an astronomer at Southern Connecticut State University, continued to explain that other collisions of gas clouds between galaxies are much further away--and therefore considerably more difficult to observe.

More than twenty small satellite galaxies orbit our Milky Way, but only the Magellanic Clouds sparkle brightly enough for observers to see them with their unaided human eyes. mashahir