The total mass of the Large Magellanic Cloud from its perturbation on the Orphan stream


 

Movie: LMC Perturbation on the Orphan stream

Credit: D. Erkal (University of Surrey, UK)
Caption: This movie shows the evolution of the Orphan stream over the past 2 Gyr. The dashed-black line shows the orbit of the Orphan progenitor, the blue points show the simulated Orphan stream, black stars show the RR Lyrae observed with Gaia DR2, and the dashed-red curve shows the orbit of the LMC. As the LMC passes the Orphan stream, it deflects it away from its initial orbit which is needed to match the observed Orphan stream.