Artist's image of the LMC and Milky Way and their associated coronas. Credit: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI) Our most massive satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), has been the center of a heated debate in the astrophysics community over the last few years. That debate centers on whether this is the LMC's first or second "pass" by the Milky Way itself—and it has huge implications for the evolution of our galaxy given the disruption such a large grouping of stars has. A new paper from Scott Lucchini, Jiwon Jesse Han, Sapna Mishra, and Andrew J. Fox and his co-authors, currently available on the arXiv preprint server, provides what they claim to be definitive evidence that this is, in fact, the first time LMC has encountered the Milky Way. To understand the debate, it's best to look at its history. For decades, there was an ongoing debate about the orbital path of the LMC. The discussion centered around a collisionless N-body dynamics model that tracked stars and their gravity.…