Trouble near the Milky Way: The Large Magellanic Cloud is ripping its smaller neighbor galaxy apart

The Small Magellanic Cloud seems to be coming undone at the gravitational hands of its sibling galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud, which has been found to be unwrapping its little brother's stars. The Small and Large Magellanic Clouds (SMC and LMC for short) are two dwarf irregular galaxies passing close to the Milky Way . The LMC is about 163,000 light years away from us, while the SMC is further away at about 200,000 light-years from us. Both are subject to disruption from the Milky Way's gravity, which triggers bursts of star formation within them and rips away a stream of gas from both, called the Magellanic Stream . However, new results from the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) at the European Southern Observatory's Paranal mountaintop site in Chile have shown the Milky Way isn't the only galaxy affecting the SMC. It turns out that the diminutive galaxy's bigger brother, the LMC, is also a disruptive influence. As part of VISTA's Survey of the Magellanic Clouds (VMC), the four-meter aperture telescope has spent the past 11 years carefully mapping the motions of millions of individual stars in the Magellanic Clouds. VISTA's near-infrared vision sees through some dust in the Magellanic Clouds, giving it a clearer view of the stars. "When I saw the results for the first time, I was amazed by the quality of the measured stellar motions," said Florian Niederhofer of Germany's Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) in a statement . …