A tiny neighbor galaxy is actually bending the Milky Way and leaving behind "ghost" trails of stars that we used to think were ancient relics.
arXiv · March 13, 2026 · 2603.11159
Why it matters
The Large Magellanic Cloud was thought to be a minor satellite, but this study shows it is powerful enough to dramatically reshape the Milky Way's halo. It reveals that famous clumps of stars near Earth aren't actually ancient collision debris, but are being actively 'aligned' by this neighbor's gravity.
From the abstract
Perturbations from the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) of the Milky Way's stellar and dark matter haloes are well-established. However, studies have generally not considered haloes with high radial anisotropy, like debris from the Gaia Sausage-Enceladus (GSE) in the Milky Way. We run a series of test particle simulations of stellar haloes with different velocity anisotropies $\beta\in[0.5,0.9]$. The LMC causes these initially axisymmetric haloes to become approximately triaxial. Their major axes ar