The Mopra 22m and SEST 15m telescopes have been used to detect and partially map a region of ^ { 12 } CO ( 1-0 ) line emission within the Magellanic Bridge , a region lying between the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds .
The emission appears to be embedded in a cloud of neutral hydrogen , and is in the vicinity of an IRAS source .
The CO emission region is found to have a 60 \mu m/100 \mu m flux density ratio typical for ^ { 12 } CO ( 1-0 ) detections within the SMC , although it has a significantly lower ^ { 12 } CO brightness and velocity width .
These suggest that the observed region is of a low metallicity , supporting earlier findings that the Magellanic Bridge is not as evolved as the SMC and Magellanic Stream , which are themselves of a lower metallicity than the Galaxy .
Our observations , along with empirical models based on SMC observations , indicate that the radius of the detected CO region has an upper limit of \sim 16 pc .
This detection is , to our knowledge , the first detection of CO emission from the Magellanic Bridge and is the only direct evidence of star formation through molecular cloud collapse in this region .