Clouds, Streams and Bridges. Redrawing the blueprint of the Magellanic System with Gaia DR1

Understand

We present the discovery of stellar tidal tails around the Large and the Small Magellanic Clouds in the Gaia DR1 data.

• In between the Clouds, their tidal arms are stretched towards each other to form an almost continuous stellar bridge.
• Our analysis relies on the exquisite quality of the Gaia's photometric catalogue to build detailed star-count maps of the Clouds.
• We demonstrate that the Gaia DR1 data can be used to detect variable stars across the whole sky, and in particular, RR Lyrae stars in and around the LMC and the SMC.