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Hassled galaxy 'thriving on chaos'

Powerful but unknown forces are at work in a small companion galaxy of the Milky Way, astronomers say in today's issue of the journal Science.Something is keeping the structure and magnetic field of this galaxy -the Large Magellanic Cloud -strong and ordered, even while the Milky Way's gravity works to tear them apart.A team led by Bryan Gaensler of the Harvard­Smithsonian for Astrophysics used the CSIRO Australia Telescope near Narrabri in NSW to study the galaxy's magnetic field.