Welcome to LMC.
The Large Magellanic Cloud is an irregular dwarf galaxy which can be seen with the naked eye as a “fuzzy blob” within New Zealand’s circumpolar region.
The easiest way to find the galaxy is to draw an imaginary line from Sirius past the right side of Canopus and follow the line to the LMC.
LMC is believed to be a satellite of our own Milky way galaxy, also belonging to the Local Group, which is a nearby group of around 54 galaxies, loosely bound by gravity.
For many years astronomers thought the Magellanic Clouds orbited the Milky Way. Recent measurements may prove that they could be moving too fast for that.
The Large Magellanic Cloud measures roughly 14,000 light years across, twice the diameter of the Small Magellanic Cloud, but is significantly smaller than the Milky Way, which is in the vicinity if 100,000 light years across.
LMC lies at an approximate distance of 163,000 light years from earth.
It is estimated to contain around 30 billion stars, and has a combined mass of 10 billion times that of our sun!
It has a prominent bar in it’s central region suggesting it may have once been a barred spiral galaxy.
It is the third nearest galaxy to the Milky Way, with only the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal galaxy in Sagittarius constellation and the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy being closer.
The Large Magellanic Cloud has a gas-rich composition, meaning a higher portion of it’s mass is in gas form, and the lesser portion of mass is bound up in metallic elements.
In spite of being relatively small in size for a galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud contains a number of notable deep sky objects, the most famous of which is the Tarantula Nebula (NGC 2070), the most active star forming region in the Local Group of galaxies.
In 1987, the nearest observed supernova to Earth since 1604 (before the invention of the first astronomical telescope in 1608) occurred, as a supergiant star in the Large Magellanic Cloud exploded.
The explosion of this star was quickly dubbed supernova 1987A. It was the closest supernova seen in nearly four centuries and so bright it was visible without a telescope. #astronomypictureoftheday
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