Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics | University of Toronto | 2017 May 12
[c][attachment=0]searching-lmc-mikesalway[1].jpg[/attachment][/c][hr][/hr]For the first time, astronomers have detected a magnetic field associated with the Magellanic Bridge, the filament of gas stretching 75 thousand light-years between the Milky Way Galaxy’s nearest galactic neighbours: the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (LMC and SMC).
Visible in the southern night sky, the LMC and SMC are dwarf galaxies that orbit our home galaxy and lie at a distance of 160 and 200 thousand light-years from Earth respectively,
“There were hints that this magnetic field might exist, but no one had observed it until now,” says Jane Kaczmarek ...
Such cosmic magnetic fields can only be detected indirectly, and this detection was made by observing the radio signals from hundreds of very distant galaxies that lie beyond the LMC and SMC. The observations were made with the Australia Telescope Compact Array radio telescope at the Paul Wild Observatory in New South Wales, Australia. ...
Detection of a Coherent Magnetic Field in the Magellanic Bridge Through Faraday Rotation - J. F. Kaczmarek et al
- Monthly Notices of the RAS 467(2):1776 (May 2017) DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stx206
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1701.05962 > 21 Jan 2017