This hot 'stream' of star gas will collide with our galaxy sooner than we thought - Livescience.com

The Milky Way is playing a violent game of tug-of-war with its two toughest neighbors — the rowdy sibling dwarf galaxies known as the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds.

More than 3 billion years of this cosmic pushing and pulling have left an enormous battle scar stretched across the Southern sky — a long, gassy arc known as the Magellanic Stream, trailing behind the Magellanic Clouds like a gout of stellar blood.

8 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the Magellanic Stream is far closer to our galaxy than previous estimates had suggested.

Accounting for recent observations of the stream's structure, a team of researchers simulated the history of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds' interactions with each other and with our galaxy.

The implications for the Magellanic Stream and its future are huge; not only do these findings suggest that the stream is about one-fifth as massive as previously thought, but also that it will collide with our galaxy much sooner — likely within about 50 million years, the researchers wrote.

In that study, the researchers found that the Large Magellanic Cloud is surrounded by a "halo" of hot, ionized gas reaching temperatures of about 900,000 degrees Fahrenheit (500,000 degrees Celsius) — which is about one-half to one-sixth the heat of our sun's outermost layer.

The corona's existence changes the story of the formation of the Magellanic Clouds and the stream.

With these forces in mind, the team developed a new computer simulation to model the history of the Magellanic Clouds and the Magellanic Stream.

The team worked backward, starting with the present locations of the clouds and turning back the clock through multiple simulations to show how the dwarf galaxies could have interacted over the eons in order to end up where they are now.

By the time the two galaxies were captured by the Milky Way, the Small Magellanic Cloud was orbiting counterclockwise around the Large one, spewing gas behind it and forming the Magellanic Stream.