Milky Way's neighbors pick up the pace
Above Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, home of the du Pont Telescope with which the SDSS's APOGEE South Spectrograph observes the southern skies. The Magellanic Clouds are visible with the unaided eye in the Southern Hemisphere.
Credit: Ryan Trainor
After slowly forming stars for the first few billion years of their lives, the Magellanic Clouds, near neighbors of our own Milky Way galaxy, have upped their game and are now forming new stars at a fast clip. This new insight into the history of the Clouds comes from the first detailed chemical maps made of galaxies beyond the Milky Way.
Named for explorer Ferdinand Magellan, who led the first European expedition to circumnavigate the globe, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are the Milky Way's nearest galactic neighbors - companion galaxies that will someday merge with our galaxy. The two galaxies are visible only from the Southern Hemisphere, where they look like bright, wispy clouds.
A Map to Stellar History
Although humans have gazed at the Clouds for millennia, this is the first time astronomers have made a detailed map of the chemical compositions of the stars within them. The project, carried out by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), was led by NOAO astronomer David Nidever, who is also a research professor of physics at Montana State University.
"We mapped the positions, movements, and chemical make-up of thousands of stars in the Magellanic Clouds," said Nidever. "Reading these maps helps us reconstruct the history of when these galaxies formed their stars."
The maps are the first major discovery to come out of the new southern operations of SDSS's Apache Point Observatory Galaxy Evolution Experiment 2 (APOGEE-2) survey, which is being carried out on the Irenee du Pont Telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.
Read more ~ spacedaily.com
