Location of the Large Magellanic Cloud with respect to the Milky Way and other satellite galaxies.

LH 95 stellar nursery in Large Magellanic Cloud. Credit: NASA/ESA

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The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is a nearby satellite galaxy of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. more...

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At a distance of slightly less than 50 kiloparsecs (≈160,000 light-years), the LMC is the third closest galaxy to the Milky Way, with the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal (~ 16 kiloparsecs) and Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy (~ 12.9 kiloparsecs) lying closer to the center of the Milky Way. It has a mass equivalent to approximately 10 billion times the mass of our Sun ( $1010$ solar masses), making it roughly 1/10 as massive as the Milky Way. The LMC is the fourth largest galaxy in the local group, with the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) and Triangulum Galaxy (M33) also having more mass.

While the LMC is often considered an irregular type galaxy, (the NASA Extragalactic Database lists the Hubble sequence type as 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 the result of tidal interactions with both the Milky Way, and the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC).

It is visible as a faint 'cloud' in the night sky of the southern hemisphere, straddling the border between the constellations of Dorado and Mensa.

History

The first recorded mention of the Large Magellanic Cloud was by the Persian astronomer Abd Al-Rahman Al Sufi in his Book of Fixed Stars around 964AD.

The next recorded observation was in 1503-4 by Amerigo Vespucci in a letter about his third voyage. In this letter he mentions \"three Canopes, two bright and one obscure”; the “bright” refers to the two Magellanic Clouds, and the \"obscure\" refers to the Coalsack.

Fernando de Magellan, on his voyage in 1519, was the first to bring the LMC into common Western knowledge. The galaxy now bears his name.

Geometry

The LMC was long considered to be a planar galaxy that could be assumed to lie at a single distance from us. However, in 1986, Caldwell and Coulson found that field Cepheid variables in the northeast portion of the LMC lie closer to the Milky Way than Cepheids in the southwest portion. More recently, this inclined geometry for fields stars in the LMC has been confirmed via observations of Cepheids, core helium burning red clump stars and the tip of the red giant branch. All three of these papers find an inclination of ~ 35^o, where a face on galaxy has an inclination of 0^o. Further work on the structure of the LMC using the kinematics of carbon stars showed that the LMC's disk is both thick and flared. Regarding the distribution of star clusters in the LMC, Schommer et al. measured velocities for ~80 clusters and found that the LMC's cluster system has kinematics consistent with the clusters moving in a disk-like distribution. These results were confirmed by Grocholski et al., who calculated distances to a number of clusters and showed that the LMC's cluster system is in fact distributed in the same plane as the field stars.