A team of astronomers led by graduate student Himansch Rathore at the University of Arizona has solved a long-standing mystery about the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). For decades, scientists puzzled over the strange lack of stellar orbits around the SMC's core and its irregular, distorted shape.
The research reveals that the SMC crashed directly through its larger neighbor, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), in the distant past. This massive collision disrupted the normal orbital patterns of stars within the SMC, sending them on wildly different trajectories that explain the observed lack of organized stellar motion around the galaxy's center.