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Large Magellanic Cloud ❍｜Definition｜1st｜20251119205401-00-⌔

Large Magellanic Cloud - Wikipedia

Large Magellanic Cloud

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The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is a dwarf galaxy and satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.1 At a distance of around 50 kiloparsecs (163,000 light-years),[^2]234 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,[^1][^5] and has roughly one-hundredth the mass of the Milky Way5 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.6 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.7 The LMC is predicted to merge with the Milky Way in approximately 2.4 billion years.8

With a declination of about −70°, the LMC is visible as a faint “cloud” from the Southern Hemisphere of the Earth and from as far north as 20° N. It straddles the constellations Dorado and Mensa and has an apparent length of about 10° to the naked eye, 20 times the Moon’s diameter, from dark sites away from light pollution.9

Printed 2026-06-28.

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Footnotes

  1. Shattow, Genevieve; Loeb, Abraham (2009). “Implications of recent measurements of the Milky Way rotation for the orbit of the Large Magellanic Cloud”. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters. 392 (1): L21–L25. arXiv:0808.0104. Bibcode:2009MNRAS.392L..21S. doi:10.1111/j.1745-3933.2008.00573.x. S2CID 85472. ↩

  2. Macri, L. M.; et al. (2006). “A New Cepheid Distance to the Maser-Host Galaxy NGC 4258 and Its Implications for the Hubble Constant”. The Astrophysical Journal. 652 (2): 1133–1149. arXiv:astro-ph/0608211. Bibcode:2006ApJ…652.1133M. doi:10.1086/508530. S2CID 15728812. ↩

  3. Freedman, Wendy L.; Madore, Barry F. (2010). “The Hubble Constant”. Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics. 48: 673–710. arXiv:1004.1856. Bibcode:2010ARA&A..48..673F. doi:10.1146/annurev-astro-082708-101829. S2CID 119263173. ↩

  4. Majaess, Daniel J.; Turner, David G.; Lane, David J.; Henden, Arne; Krajci, Tom (2010). “Anchoring the Universal Distance Scale via a Wesenheit Template”. Journal of the American Association of Variable Star Observers. 39 (1): 122. arXiv:1007.2300. Bibcode:2011JAVSO..39..122M. ↩

  5. “Magellanic Cloud”. Encyclopædia Britannica. 2009. Retrieved 2009-08-30. ↩

  6. Ryden, Barbara; Peterson, Bradley M. (2009). Foundations of Astrophysics. New York: Pearson Addison-Wesley. p. 471. ISBN 9780321595584. ↩

  7. Besla, Gurtina; Martínez-Delgado, David; Marel, Roeland P. van der; Beletsky, Yuri; Seibert, Mark; Schlafly, Edward F.; Grebel, Eva K.; Neyer, Fabian (2016). “Low Surface Brightness Imaging of the Magellanic System: Imprints of Tidal Interactions between the Clouds in the Stellar Periphery”. The Astrophysical Journal. 825 (1): 20. arXiv:1602.04222. Bibcode:2016ApJ…825…20B. doi:10.3847/0004-637X/825/1/20. ISSN 0004-637X. S2CID 118462693. ↩

  8. McAlpine, Stuart; Frenk, Carlos S.; Deason, Alis J.; Cautun, Marius (2019-02-21). “The aftermath of the Great Collision between our Galaxy and the Large Magellanic Cloud”. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 483 (2): 2185–2196. arXiv:1809.09116. Bibcode:2019MNRAS.483.2185C. doi:10.1093/mnras/sty3084. ISSN 0035-8711. ↩

  9. Sessions, Larry (December 8, 2021). “The Magellanic Clouds, our galactic neighbors”. EarthSky. Retrieved 2013-07-17. ↩

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