This video accompanies the Gaia Early Data Release 3 (Gaia EDR3) paper on the Magellanic Clouds.
It tells a little story on Gaia EDR3 results on the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) and Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), showing the stellar populations, the proper motion, the rotational part of it, and the streaming of stars from the SMC to the LMC.
The structure loss of the LMC during its rotation and the "expansion" of the LMC seen in the last part are unavoidable artefacts from the fact that only a linear proper motion can be shown with Gaia Sky.
Data sets provided by Merce Romero-Gomez. Video based on the paper: Gaia Early Data Release 3: structure and properties of the Magellanic Clouds by Gaia Collaboration, X. Luri et al., A&A 2020 (in press).
Credits: ESA/Gaia/DPAC
Released under CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Acknowledgements: Produced by Stefan Jordan and Toni Sagristà with Gaia Sky (http://www.zah.uni-heidelberg.de/gaia/outreach/gaiasky)
Based on paper by Gaia Collaboration, Luri et al.: "Gaia Early Data Release 3: structure and properties of the Magellanic Clouds", Astronomy and Astrophysics, in press.
Page last updated: 03 December 2020