{"id":16982,"date":"2019-11-15T05:56:34","date_gmt":"2019-11-15T05:56:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/?p=16982"},"modified":"2020-06-09T12:39:48","modified_gmt":"2020-06-09T12:39:48","slug":"two-cosmic-peacocks-show-history-of-the-magellanic-clouds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/two-cosmic-peacocks-show-history-of-the-magellanic-clouds\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Cosmic Peacocks show History of the Magellanic Clouds"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Two peacock-shaped gaseous clouds were revealed in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC)<\/a> by observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter\/submillimeter Array (ALMA). <\/a> This research was published on November 14, 2019 in the Astrophysical Journal.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to researchers, they have found several massive baby stars in the complex filamentary clouds, which agrees well with computer simulations of giant collisions of gaseous clouds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The researchers\ninterpret this to mean that the filaments and young stars are telltale evidence\nof violent interactions between the LMC and the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC)\n200 million years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Astronomers know that stars are formed in collapsing\nclouds in space. However, the formation processes of giant stars, 10 times or\nmore massive than the Sun, are not well understood because it is difficult to\npack such a large amount of material into a small region. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some researchers\nsuggest that interactions between galaxies provide a perfect environment for\nmassive star formation. Due to the colossal gravity, clouds in the galaxies are\nstirred, stretched, and often collide with each other. A huge amount of gas is\ncompressed in an unusually small area, which could form the seeds of massive\nstars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A research team used ALMA to study the structure of dense\ngas in N159, a bustling star formation region in the LMC. By using ALMA\u2019s high\nresolution technique, the team obtained a detailed map of the clouds in two\nsub-regions, N159E-Papillon Nebula and N159W South.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Interestingly, the cloud structures in the two regions\nlook very similar: fan-shaped filaments of gas extending to the north with the\npivots in the southernmost points. The ALMA observations also found several\nmassive baby stars in the filaments in the two regions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt is unnatural that in two regions separated by 150 light-years, clouds with such similar shapes were formed and that the ages of the baby stars are similar,\u201d says Kazuki Tokuda, a researcher at Osaka Prefecture University<\/a> and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan<\/a>. \u201cThere must be a common cause of these features. Interaction between the LMC and SMC is a good candidate.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2017, Yasuo Fukui, a professor at Nagoya University<\/a> and his team revealed the motion of hydrogen gas in the LMC and found that a gaseous component right next to N159<\/a> has a different velocity than the rest of the clouds. They suggested a hypothesis that the starburst is caused by a massive flow of gas from the SMC to the LMC, and that this flow originated from a close encounter between the two galaxies 200 million years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The pair of peacock-shaped clouds in the two regions\nrevealed by ALMA fits nicely with this hypothesis. Computer simulations show\nthat many filamentary structures are formed in a short time after a collision\nof two clouds, which also backs this idea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFor the first time, we uncovered a link between massive star formation and galaxy interactions in very sharp detail,\u201d says Fukui, the lead author of one of the research papers. \u201cThis is an important step in understanding the formation process of massive star clusters in which galaxy interactions have a big impact.\u201d<\/p>\n
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