The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is a nearby irregular

Irregular galaxy

An irregular galaxy is a galaxy that does not have a distinct regular shape, like a spiral or an elliptical galaxy. The shape of an irregular galaxy is uncommon – they do not fall into any of the regular classes of the Hubble sequence, and they are often chaotic in appearance, with neither a...

 galaxy

Galaxy

A galaxy is a massive, gravitationally bound system that consists of stars and stellar remnants, an interstellar medium of gas and dust, and an important but poorly understood component tentatively dubbed dark matter. The word galaxy is derived from the Greek galaxias , literally "milky", a...

, and is a satellite

Satellite galaxy

A satellite galaxy orbits a larger galaxy due to gravitational attraction. Although a galaxy is made of a large number of objects which are not connected to each other, it has a center of mass, which represents a weighted average of the positions of each component object...

 of the Milky Way

Milky Way

The Milky Way is the galaxy that contains the Solar System. This name derives from its appearance as a dim un-resolved "milky" glowing band arching across the night sky...

. At a distance of slightly less than 50 kiloparsecs (≈160,000 light-year

Light-year

A light-year, also light year or lightyear is a unit of length, equal to just under 10 trillion kilometres...

s), the LMC is the third closest galaxy to the Milky Way, with the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal

Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy

The Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy is an elliptical loop-shaped satellite galaxy of the Milky Way Galaxy. It consists of four globular clusters, the main cluster being discovered in 1994...

 (~ 16 kiloparsecs) and Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy

Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy

The Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy is located in the same part of the sky as the constellation Canis Major. The galaxy contains a relatively high percentage of red giant stars, and is thought to contain an estimated one billion stars in all....

 (~ 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 mass

Solar mass

The solar mass , , is a standard unit of mass in astronomy, used to indicate the masses of other stars and galaxies...

es), making it roughly 1/100 as massive as the Milky Way, and a diameter of about 14,000 light-years.