New SMASH 1 satellite discovered in the large Magellan cloud

A new satellite with a rather faint appearance, called SMASH 1, has just been found in the large Magellan cloud, making astronomers curious.

Accordingly, international astronomer Nicolas Martin operates at Strasbourg Observatory in France just announced that he and his team discovered a star system of small, very faint satellites with scientific name SMASH 1 exists in the Large Magellanic Cloud through dark energy astronomical camera technology (DECam) mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco Telescope at Chile's Cerro Tololo (CTIO) Observatory.

The new discovery shows that SMASH 1 is a faint satellite star system, having a brightness of only 200 times, at an angle compared to the sun's brightness, which is compact in size, with a radius of about 29 light years, 186,000 light-years from our Earth and 42,000 light-years away from the large Magellanic cloud.

In addition, the research team also said that SMASH 1 is estimated to be 13 billion years old and is a poor starlight system and poor metal in stellar structure.

Image source: Phys.

There is another view that SMASH 1 may be a particular satellite cluster, influenced and subject to the operation of the large Magellan cloud. However, there is a contradictory view that SMASH 1's orbital speed does not depend on the large Magellan cloud.

There is currently no satisfactory explanation for whether or not the dependence of SMASH 1 on the large Magellan cloud.

This finding has just been published online on arXiv.org.

According to Wikipedia, the large Magellanic cloud (abbreviated in English: LMC) is a dwarf amorphous galaxy in a neighboring group (sometimes referred to as a satellite galaxy) of the Milky Way, the larger galaxy in the group. The two galaxies are named after the Portuguese maritime explorer Ferdinand Magellan (1480-1521). With a distance of less than 160 thousand light years, the LMC is the third galaxy from the center of the Milky Way, after Sag DEG and Canis Major; With a volume of 10 billion times our solar mass and a radius of 7,000 light years, LMC is only 1/100 of the Milky Way in volume but equal to 1/8 if compared to the size, ranking fourth in the group direction. With an apparent magnitude of 0.9, the LMC can be seen as a faint cloud in the night sky of the southern celestial sphere, slightly darker than the Niu Lang star (0.77).

Huynh Dung ( Theo Phys)