Accretion Onto the Milky Way: The Smith Cloud
  Active gas accretion onto the Milky Way is observed in an object called the
Smith Cloud, which contains several million solar masses of neutral and warm
ionized gas and is currently losing material to the Milky Way, adding angular
momentum to the disk. It is several kpc in size and its tip lies two kpc below
the Galactic plane. It appears to have no stellar counterpart, but could
contain a stellar population like that of the dwarf galaxy Leo P. There are
suggestions that its existence and survival require that it be embedded in a
dark matter halo of a few 10^8 solar masses.
