The tip of the “wing” of the Small Magellanic Cloud galaxy NASA/CXC/JPL-Caltech/STSc
Our galactic neighbour is starting to fall apart after colliding with a nearby galaxy.
The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are the two brightest galaxies that orbit our own, lying just 160,000 and 200,000 light years away. And the larger of the two is sucking in material from its smaller counterpart, pulling the smaller galaxy apart star by star.
Paul Zivick and Nitya Kallivayalil at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, and their colleagues used the Hubble Space Telescope to track the motions of stars…
