We’re taking a deeper look at the Milky Way’s nearest neighbors of notable size: the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. These two irregular galaxies are currently flying past our own galaxy and interacting with it gravitationally. Their location makes them prime targets for exploration, and a team using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) has released amazing new data on these systems. The DECam is on the four-meter Blanco telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile. Over fifty nights, a large team of astronomers obtained about 2400 square degrees of data that map both galaxies and their surroundings and are sensitive to objects as faint as around 24th magnitude in five colors.

This data will be used to understand the stellar populations of these galaxies. This scientific purpose contributed to one of the more amusing acronyms of the year: SMASH, which stands for the Survey of Magellanic Stellar History, where both the M and A at the beginning of Magellanic are included in this smashing acronym.

According to Glen Langston, the National Science Foundation (NSF) program officer behind this survey: These are beautiful multicolor images of the Milky Way’s nearest neighboring galaxies. Through the care the dedicated team has taken, they give us a remarkable view of the thirteen billion year history of star formation in these galaxies.

Project co-lead Knut Olsen goes on to add: Besides producing amazing images, these data allow us to look into the past and reconstruct how the Magellanic Clouds formed their stars over time; with these ‘movies’ of star formation we can try to understand how and why these galaxies evolved.

Again, this is a data release paper, and I can’t wait to see the science that will be coming in the future.

More Information

NOIRLab press release 

“The Second Data Release of the Survey of the MAgellanic Stellar History (SMASH),” David L. Nidever, Knut Olsen, et al., 2020, Astronomical Journal (preprint on arxiv.org)