MAGELLANIC
CLOUDS - SCI & TECH
News: Correcting historical injustice
through renaming is fraught
What's
in the news?
●
The names of the Large and Small
Magellanic Clouds are under a cloud. A report in The Guardian speaks of
astronomers appealing to the International Astronomical Union, calling for a
change in the names of the dwarf satellite galaxies over the Southern Hemisphere.
Magellanic
Cloud:
- The
Magellanic Clouds are irregular
galaxies that share a gaseous envelope and lie about 22° apart in the sky
near the south celestial pole.
- They
are comprised of two irregular galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC)
and the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), which orbit the Milky Way once every
1,500 million years and each other once every 900 million years.
- These
companion galaxies were named for the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand
Magellan, whose crew discovered them during the first voyage around the
world (1519–22).
- Magellanic
Clouds were formed at about the same time as the Milky Way Galaxy,
approximately 13 billion years ago.
- They
are presently captured in orbits around the Milky Way Galaxy and have
experienced several tidal encounters with each other and with the Galaxy.
- They
contain numerous young stars and star clusters, as well as some much older
stars.
- The
Magellanic Clouds are visible to the unaided eye in the Southern
Hemisphere.