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Large Magellanic Cloud

Artist’s impression of a hypervelocity star ejected from the Large Magellanic Cloud (shown on right). When a binary star system ventures too close to a supermassive black hole, the intense gravitational forces tear the pair apart. One star is captured into a tight orbit around the black hole, while the other is flung outward at extreme velocities—often exceeding thousands of kilometers per second—becoming a hypervelocity star. The inset illustration depicts this process: the original binary’s orbital path is shown as interwoven lines, with one star being captured by the black hole (near center of inset) while the other is ejected into space (lower right).

Runaway Stars Reveal Hidden Black Hole in Milky Way’s Nearest Neighbor

Categories Physics & Mathematics, Space
This artist's illustration depicts the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) in the foreground as it passes through the gaseous halo of the much larger Milky Way galaxy. The encounter has stripped away much of the LMC's spherical gas halo, leaving a trailing gas stream resembling a comet's tail. However, a compact halo remains intact, and scientists predict this residual halo will not dissipate entirely. The research team studied the LMC's halo by analyzing the light from 28 quasars, exceptionally bright active galactic nuclei that act as "lighthouse beacons" across the universe. This light enables scientists to detect the halo gas indirectly, as the gas absorbs some of the quasars' light. The lines in the illustration represent the path of the Hubble Space Telescope's observations, from its orbit around Earth to the distant quasars, passing through the LMC's gas halo.

Hubble Reveals Impact of Galaxy’s Close Encounter with Milky Way

Categories Space

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