Astronomy

About 40 years ago, astronomers saw a long ribbon of gas stretching almost halfway across the Milky Way Galaxy. This ribbon of gas was named the Magellanic Stream after what astronomers thought it came from: the Small or Large Magellanic Cloud. Until now, astronomers were uncertain from which cloud the ribbon came from. But now they know for certain that it came from the Small Magellanic Cloud about 2 million years ago.  This was reported in The Astrophysical Journal. They found this out by studying the composition of the Magellanic Stream. Most of the strips components matched those of the Small Magellanic Cloud. But, parts of the Stream closer to the Clouds found a higher abundance of sulfur, which matches with the Large Magellanic Cloud. This suggests that this strip was ripped off of the Large Magellanic Cloud more recently. Spacetelescope.org gives us more insight on the topic.
ls of the Stream predicted it solely cam from the Small Magellanic Cloud because of its weaker gravitational pull compared to the large Magellanic Cloud. In order to find out the abundance of elements in the stream, they had to look through the ultraviolet part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Only the Hubble telescope is capable of doing this.