The orbital history of the Magellanic Clouds. Panel (a) shows the Magellanic Stream in Cartesian coordinates at three different times during the Clouds’ infall. The present-day Stream is shown in color. The MW disk is at the origin and denoted by the gray shaded oval (the Sun is located at (x, y, z) = (−8.3, 0, 0.027) kpc). The solid and dashed lines represent the past orbital trajectories of the LMC and SMC, respectively. A zoomed inset of the present-day Stream can be seen in the panel on the left with the locations of the Clouds in the simulation marked with circles. The color of the gas represents plane-projected density on an arbitrary scale with higher densities represented as lighter colors. Panel (b) shows the distance between the center of masses of the LMC and SMC in kpc as they orbit around each other and fall in toward the MW. The model presented here is compared with previous works (shown as a dotted line; B12; P18). Present day is on the right side of the plot (t = 0), and the Clouds’ initial state is on the left side (t = −3.5 Gyr for the present work). Vertical dashed lines denote the times of the two past images in panel (a) (shown in gray scale). An animation of this figure is available. It is 9 s long and shows the evolution of the Clouds and the Stream over the past 3.5 Gyr.

(An animation of this figure is available.)

The video/animation of this figure is available in the online journal.