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The Large Magellanic Cloud is an irregular galaxy that orbits the Milky Way as one of its satellite galaxies. It matters to astronomers because studying it helps us understand how galaxies interact and evolve, and it serves as a nearby laboratory for observing stellar processes and cosmic phenomena.
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Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- galaxy
- Part of
- Milky Way subgroup
- Has part
- Q88365157
- Named after
- Ferdinand Magellan
- Constellation
- Dorado
- Parent body
- Milky Way
- Distance from Earth
- 50.12
- Radius
- 2.1
- Mass
- 13000000000
- Image
- Large.mc.arp.750pix.jpg
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- Commons category
- Large Magellanic Cloud
- topic's main category
- Category:Large Magellanic Cloud
- catalog code
- 2FHL J0526.6-6825e
- redshift
- 0.00093
- galaxy morphological type
- SB(s)m
- apparent magnitude
- 0.4
- right ascension
- 80.89417
- declination
- -69.75611
- radial velocity
- 262.2
- epoch
- J2000.0
- discoverer or inventor
- Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi
- time of discovery or invention
- 0964-00-00
- metallicity
- -0.55
- absolute magnitude
- -18.5
- right ascension component of proper motion
- 1.910
- declination component of proper motion
- 0.229
- short name
- VMO
- on focus list of Wikimedia project
- Wikipedia:Vital articles/Level/4
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Encyclopedic overview
The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is a dwarf galaxy and satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. At a distance of around 50 kiloparsecs (163,000 light-years), the LMC is the second- or third-closest galaxy to the Milky Way, after the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal (c. 16 kiloparsecs (52,000 light-years) away) and the possible dwarf irregular galaxy called the Canis Major Overdensity. It is about 9.86 kiloparsecs (32,200 light-years) across, and has roughly one-hundredth the mass of the Milky Way making it the fourth-largest galaxy in the Local Group, after the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), the Milky Way, and the Triangulum Galaxy (M33).
The LMC is classified as a Magellanic spiral. It contains a stellar bar that is geometrically off-center, suggesting that it was once a barred dwarf spiral galaxy before its spiral arms were disrupted, likely by tidal interactions from the nearby Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) and the Milky Way's gravity. The LMC is predicted to merge with the Milky Way in approximately 2.4 billion years.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Large Magellanic Cloud” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.
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