Large Magellanic Cloud

Visible as a faint "cloud" in the night sky of the southern hemisphere straddling the border between the constellations of Dorado and Mensa, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is a nearby galaxy, and a satellite of the Milky Way. At a distance of about 50 kiloparsecs (≈163,000 light-years), the LMC is the third closest galaxy to the Milky Way, after the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal (~ 16 kiloparsecs) and the putative Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy (~ 12.9 kiloparsecs, though its status as a galaxy is not certain).Its visual diameter is more than 20 times the width of the full moon. While the LMC is often considered an irregular galaxy (type Irr/SB(s)m), the LMC contains a very prominent bar in its center, suggesting that it may have previously been a barred spiral galaxy. The LMC's irregular appearance is possibly result of tidal interactions with both the Milky Way and the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC).It has a mass equivalent to approximately 10 billion times the mass of the Sun, making it roughly 1/100 as massive as the Milky Way, and a diameter of about 14,000 light-years (~ 4.3 kpc). The LMC is the fourth largest galaxy in the Local Group, after the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), the Milky Way, and the Triangulum Galaxy (M33. This widefield image covers about 6.5 x 4.5°. Much more detailed view of the eastern part of the LMC can be found here .

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