A powerful Australian radio telescope CSIRO ASCAP
Astronomers from the Australian National University and CSIRO witnessed the slow death of a nearby dwarf galaxy, which is gradually losing power for the birth of new stars.
This is the Small Magellanic Cloud (MMO), which in size and mass occupies only a small part of the Milky Way. The images are extracted with the ASCAP CSIRO powerful radio interferometer. The researchers report that the images were 3 times more accurate than the previous photos, which allowed us to study the interactions between the small galaxy and the environment with greater accuracy. Thus, it was possible to notice a strong outflow of gaseous hydrogen from the IMO. Implication is a galaxy that will eventually lose the ability to form new stars with the loss of all gas reserves. Such galaxies gradually disappear. This is the first explicit observation of measuring the amount of mass lost from a dwarf galaxy. The findings suggest that in the final, the Milky Way will swallow MMOs.
ASCAP with its unique radio receivers, which open a panoramic view of the sky, played an important role in the study. He managed to fix the entire MMO galaxy with its hydrogen gas (the most common element in the universe). ASCAP will continue to monitor the hydrogen gas in order to understand the process of merging the dwarf galaxy with the Milky Way.
