ILLUSTRATION OF GALAXIES RIPPED APART BY MILKY WAY, 1998-08-19 (photo)

The Milky Way's gravitational pull is ripping apart two smaller neighbor galaxies, astronomers at a meeting at the Australian Academy of Science in Canberra announced August 19. By tugging on the nearest edges of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, as shown in this photo illustration, the Milky Way is tearing open these galaxies, letting loose a vast stream of hydrogen gas, they said. The Magellanic Clouds are comparatively small galaxies less than one-tenth the size of the Milky Way, which contains Earth, and circle around the outer edge of our galaxy. Using a new multibeam instrument of the Parkes radio telescope, developed by the government-owned Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), scientists settled a 25-year-old controversy over the origins of the so-called Magellanic Stream. CM/SV