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The properties of dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way (MW) are useful for testing models of the formation of our Galaxy, and by extension various theories of cosmology. Recent efforts to measure the masses of the MW's satellite dwarf…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2025-12-12 Thomas Donlon , Sukanya Chakrabarti , Jason A. S. Hunt

The Large Magellanic Cloud is the most massive satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, with an estimated mass exceeding a tenth of the mass of the Milky Way. Just past its closest approach of about 50 kpc, and flying by the Milky Way at an…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2020-11-24 Michael S. Petersen , Jorge Peñarrubia

The dominant gaseous structure in the Galactic halo is the Magellanic Stream, an extended network of neutral and ionized filaments surrounding the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (LMC/SMC), the two most massive satellite galaxies of the…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2020-09-10 Scott Lucchini , Elena D'Onghia , Andrew J Fox , Chad Bustard , Joss Bland-Hawthorn , Ellen Zweibel

The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (LMC and SMC, respectively) are the largest satellite galaxies of the Milky Way (MW) and their interactions with each other have given rise to multiple stellar substructures in their periphery as well…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2026-02-06 Bethany Garver , David Nidever , Victor Debattista , Nathan Deg

The infall of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) into the Milky Way (MW) has displaced the MW's centre of mass, manifesting as an observed reflex motion in the velocities of outer halo stars. We use a Simulation Based Inference framework to…

We consider the possibility that the Magellanic Clouds were the largest members of a group of dwarf galaxies that entered the Milky Way (MW) halo at late times. Seven of the eleven brightest satellites of the MW may have been part of this…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-13 Elena D'Onghia , George Lake

Recent observational and theoretical studies on the three-dimensional (3D) space motions of the Large and the Small Magellanic Clouds (LMC and SMC, respectively) have strongly suggested that the latest proper motion measurements of the…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-13 Kenji Bekki

The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is the most luminous satellite galaxy of the Milky Way and owing to its companion, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), represents an excellent laboratory to study the interaction of dwarf galaxies. The aim of…

Recent proper motion measurements of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (LMC and SMC, respectively) by Kallivayalil et al (2006a,b) suggest that the 3D velocities of the Clouds are substantially higher (~100 km/s) than previously…

The history of the Magellanic Clouds is investigated using N-body hydrodynamic simulations where the initial conditions are set by a genetic algorithm. This technique allows us to identify possible orbits for the Magellanic Clouds around…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-06-22 Magda Guglielmo , Geraint F. Lewis , Joss Bland-Hawthorn

The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (LMC/SMC) are the closest major satellite galaxies of the Milky Way. They are likely on their first passage on an infalling orbit towards our Galaxy (Besla et al. 2007) and trace the ongoing dynamics of…

The Magellanic Clouds are a nearby pair of interacting dwarf galaxies and satellites of the Milky Way. Studying their kinematic properties is essential to understanding their origin and dynamical evolution. They have prominent tidal…

Dwarf galaxies enable us to study the early phases of galaxy evolution and are key to many open questions about the hierarchical structure of the Universe. The Large and Small Magellanic Cloud (LMC and SMC) are the most luminous dwarf…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2019-11-06 Thomas Schmidt , Maria-Rosa Cioni , Florian Niederhofer , Jonathan Diaz , Gal Matijevic

Recent high precision proper motions from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) suggest that the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (LMC and SMC, respectively) are either on their first passage or on an eccentric long period (>6 Gyr) orbit about…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-05-19 Gurtina Besla , Nitya Kallivayalil , Lars Hernquist , Roeland P. van der Marel , T. J. Cox , Dusan Keres

Using Blue Horizontal Branch stars identified in the Dark Energy Survey Year 1 data, we report the detection of an extended and lumpy stellar debris distribution around the Magellanic Clouds. At the heliocentric distance of the Clouds,…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-12-23 Vasily Belokurov , Sergey Koposov

We present a study illustrating the effects of the passage of a Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) mass satellite on the distance and velocity distributions of satellites in $\Lambda+$Cold Dark Matter simulations of Milky Way (MW) sized halos. In…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2024-06-24 Andrey Kravtsov , Sophia Winney

The highly organised distribution of satellite galaxies surrounding the Milky Way is a serious challenge to the concordance cosmological model. Perhaps the only remaining solution, in this framework, is that the dwarf satellite galaxies…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2015-05-30 Garry W. Angus , Antonaldo Diaferio , Pavel Kroupa

The Large and Small Magellanic Cloud (LMC and SMC) form the closest interacting galactic system to the Milky Way, therewith providing a laboratory to test cosmological models in the local Universe. We quantify the likelihood for the…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2024-10-02 Moritz Haslbauer , Indranil Banik , Pavel Kroupa , Hongsheng Zhao , Elena Asencio

In HST Cycles 11 and 13 we obtained two epochs of ACS/HRC data for fields in the Magellanic Clouds centered on background quasars. We used these data to determine the proper motions of the LMC and SMC to better than 5% and 15% respectively.…