Depth 47 · Satellite galaxy

Large Magellanic Cloud

The Large Magellanic Cloud is a small galaxy of billions of stars that orbits our Milky Way. It is the most massive of the Milky Way's satellite galaxies and a busy site of star birth, which makes it a nearby laboratory for studying how stars form and die.

Fact sheet

Type

Dwarf irregular galaxy

Distance

About 160,000 light-years from Earth

Size

About 15,000 light-years across

Constellation

Dorado

Position in the sky

Right ascension 5h 23m, declination −69° 46′

Seeing it from Earth

It is easy to see with the naked eye as a faint, cloud-like glow from the Southern Hemisphere and from low northern latitudes.

On the voyage

Depth 47, in the Galactic core and beyond section of the route, between Sagittarius A* and the Andromeda Galaxy

Things to know

• It is the most massive of the Milky Way's satellite galaxies and is named after the 16th-century navigator Ferdinand Magellan, whose crew studied the southern sky on the first voyage around the world. NASA
• Supernova 1987A, which exploded in the Large Magellanic Cloud, was the nearest supernova seen in hundreds of years and shone with the power of about 100 million Suns for several months. NASA
• Its Tarantula Nebula (30 Doradus) is a giant star-forming region about 1,000 light-years across. NASA
• A 2019 study used 20 eclipsing binary stars to measure the galaxy's distance to within about 1%, at roughly 49.6 kiloparsecs. arXiv
• It is bright enough that astronauts on the International Space Station have photographed it as a hazy smudge above Earth. NASA

Sources

• NASA APOD – The Large Cloud of Magellan (2023 September 7)
• NASA Earth Observatory – The Galaxy Next Door
• Pietrzyński et al. 2019, Nature 567, 200 – A distance to the LMC precise to one per cent (arXiv:1903.08096)