The surprising part was that the models brought the stream much closer to the Milky Way.".
The results mean that the gas in the Magellanic Stream is likely to start colliding with the Milky Way sooner than we thought, injecting it with new material and generating shocks that will cause gas to clump together to form new stars.These stars ought to have been removed from the Magellanic Clouds along with the gas, but so far only a few have been identified, and not conclusively.
"It's shifting the paradigm of the stream," Lucchini said.