The Large Magellanic Cloud, LMC

the Large Magellanic Cloud

The Large Magellanic Cloud, together with its apparent neighbor and relative,

the Small Magellanic Cloud, are conspicuous objects in the

southern hemisphere, looking like separated pieces of the Milky Way for the naked

eye. They were certainly known since the earliest times by the ancient southerners,

but these people produced little documents which are still preserved. So it was

Magellan and his discovery expedition who brought them to our knowledge in 1519.

Both Magellanic Clouds are irregular dwarf galaxies orbiting our

Milky Way galaxy, and thus are members of our

Local Group of galaxies. The Large Magellanic

Cloud, at its distance of 179,000 light years, was longly considered the nearest

external galaxy, until in 1994, the

discovered at only about 80,000 light years.

(Our current distance value takes into account the corrected Cepheid distance

scale based on the Hipparcos satellite data published in early 1997.)

Although a small irregular galaxy, the LMC is full of interesting objects

including diffuse nebulae (especially the Tarantula Nebula, NGC 2070, a giant

H II region), globular and open clusters, planetary nebulae, and more.

On February 24, 1987, supernova 1987A occurred in the Large Magellanic Cloud,

which was the nearest observed supernova since Keplers, which occured before

the invention of the telescope. Supernova 1987A, peculiar and of type II,

was one of the most interesting objects for the astrophysicists in the 1980s

(some even say of this century).

In the

The image in this page was obtained by David Malin with the

Anglo-Australian Telescope.

This image is copyrighted and may be used for private purpose only. For any other

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