I Hear that Beat Heart'n

Photo by Adonis

The most prominent of the Milky Way's satellite galaxies - a pair of galaxies called the Magellanic Clouds - appears to be interacting with the Milky Way's ghostly dark matter to create a mysterious warp in the galactic disk that has puzzled astronomers for half a century.

They found that the atomic gas layer is vibrating like a drum, and that the vibration consists almost entirely of three notes, or modes.

Astronomers previously dismissed the Magellanic Clouds - comprised of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds - as a probable cause of the galactic warp because the galaxies' combined masses are only 2 percent that of the disk. This mass was thought too small to influence a massive disk equivalent to about 200 billion suns during the clouds' 1.5 billion-year orbit of the galaxy.

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