Stellar motions reveal backbone of the Large Magellanic Cloud

Potsdam, Germany (SPX) Mar 30, 2022

Using data from the VISTA survey of the Magellanic Clouds system (VMC), researchers at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP), in collaboration with scientists from the VMC team, confirmed the existence of elongated orbits which are at the backbone of the bar formation process. The method used repeated imaging observations to construct a velocity map of stars in the central region