A Tale of Winds and Tides: Characterizing the Properties of the Magellanic Stream
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AAS
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2024
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Gaseous debris expelled from the disk of a galaxy can form galactic winds. These winds can be pulled between galaxies due to gravitational interactions. One of the most prominent examples is the Magellanic Stream (MS): a trail of gaseous material flowing behind the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) likely extracted from the LMC’s galactic winds. To characterize the MS’s chemical properties, we probe along four O stellar sightlines using a combination of UV absorption-line spectroscopy from the Hubble Space Telescope’s Ultraviolet Legacy Library of Young Stars as Essential Standards (ULLYSES) program and H I emission-line data from the Galactic Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (GASKAP). We kinematically separated the LMC’s disk from the MS using two methods: calculating column density-weighted velocity centers and widths from position-velocity maps and performing Gaussian decomposition on the H I emission. We conclude part of the MS is kinematically between +238 ≤ vlsr ≤ +312 km/s by comparing the H I emission data with the UV absorption-line spectra. We selected low and intermediate-ionization species (e.g., Fe II, Fe III, S II, Ni II, Al II, and Al III) to explore column densities, doppler parameters, and central velocities. Our goal is to better understand the kinematics and ionization properties along the MS while helping to constrain its origin.
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Physics and Astronomy