THE Milky Way’s two best-known companions may be nothing more than strangers passing by. Recent observations of the Magellanic Clouds, a pair of nearby dwarf galaxies, reveal that they are moving too fast to be satellites of the Milky Way – unless our galaxy contains twice as much dark matter as thought.
“They are moving too fast to be satellites of the Milky Way, unless our galaxy has twice as much dark matter as thought”
Astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, compared Hubble Space Telescope images…
