Small Magellanic Cloud

galaxy

The Small Magellanic Cloud — a dwarf irregular satellite galaxy ~200,000 light-years away, ~7,000 light-years across, being stretched by the Milky Way's and the LMC's gravity into a long tidal stream of gas.

Open in 3D viewSee Small Magellanic Cloud in the live, interactive 3D map

Science

Classification

Type: Dwarf irregular galaxy (Milky Way satellite)
Distance: ~200,000 light-years
Diameter: ~7,000 light-years

Notable

Being disrupted: Stretched into a tidal stream by the Milky Way & the LMC
In history: Leavitt's Cepheids here (1908-12) gave the first cosmic distance scale

How we know

Note: A REAL photograph of the Small Magellanic Cloud, at its real position and size. Its true 3-D orientation can't be shown, so the image is presented as seen from Earth.

Discovery & history

Name: Named, like the LMC, for Ferdinand Magellan's expedition.

Known with the LMC to southern and equatorial observers since antiquity; recorded by Al Sufi and by Magellan's crew. Henrietta Leavitt's 1908-12 study of its Cepheids gave astronomy its first way to measure cosmic distances.

Images

The Small Magellanic Cloud — a real wide-field image of the dwarf satellite galaxy (as seen from Earth) — ESO / Digitized Sky Survey 2 (CC BY 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons

Images from open archives · credit shown per image