Large Magellanic Cloud

by Jim DeLillo

Title

Large Magellanic Cloud

Artist

Jim DeLillo

Medium

Photograph - Digital Photo

Description

Actual astrophotography

The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.[5] At a distance of around 50 kiloparsecs (≈163,000 light-years),[2][6][7][8] the LMC is the second- or third-closest galaxy to the Milky Way, after the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal (~16 kpc) and the possible dwarf irregular galaxy known as the Canis Major Overdensity. Based on readily visible stars and a mass of approximately 10 billion solar masses, the diameter of the LMC is about 14,000 light-years (4.3 kpc), making it roughly one one-hundredth as massive as the Milky Way.[3] This makes the LMC 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.[9] It contains a stellar bar that is geometrically off-center, suggesting that it was a barred dwarf spiral galaxy before its spiral arms were disrupted, likely by tidal interactions from the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) and the Milky Way's gravity.[10]

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.[11]

The Milky Way and the LMC are predicted to collide in approximately 2.4 billion years.[12]

Uploaded

January 12th, 2021

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