What type of galaxy are the Magellanic Clouds?

irregular galaxies
The Magellanic Clouds are irregular galaxies that share a gaseous envelope and lie about 22° apart in the sky near the south celestial pole. One of them, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), is a luminous patch about 5° in diameter, and the other, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), measures less than 2° across.

What is inside the Large Magellanic Cloud?

The LMC is classified as a Magellanic spiral. 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.

What are galaxy clouds made of?

An interstellar cloud is generally an accumulation of gas, plasma, and dust in our and other galaxies. Put differently, an interstellar cloud is a denser-than-average region of the interstellar medium (ISM), the matter and radiation that exists in the space between the star systems in a galaxy.

Do the Magellanic Clouds have black holes?

Astronomers using the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope have discovered a low-mass black hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, some 160,000 light-years away.

Do Magellanic Clouds have stars?

The star cluster has a low metallicity and belongs to the leading arm of the Magellanic Clouds. The existence of this star cluster suggests that the leading arm of the Magellanic Clouds is 90,000 light-years away from the Milky Way—closer than previously thought.

How many Magellanic clouds are there?

two galaxies
The two galaxies are: Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), approximately 163,000 light-years away. Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), approximately 206,000 light years away.

What are interstellar hydrogen clouds?

hydrogen cloud, also called H I region or H i region, interstellar matter in which hydrogen is mostly neutral, rather than ionized or molecular. These clouds can be seen as separate structures within the lower-density interstellar medium or else on the outer edges of the molecular clouds.

What is the fate of the Magellanic Clouds?

Nearly 200,000 light-years from Earth, the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, floats in space in a long and slow dance around our galaxy. As the Milky Way’s gravity gently tugs on its neighbor’s gas clouds, they collapse to form new stars.

What are the two Magellanic Clouds?

The two Magellanic Clouds is a binary galactic system transiting our neighbourhood at a distance between 160 and 200 hundred light-years. It is comprised of two irregular dwarf galaxies known as the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, abbreviated as LMC and SMC.

Can the Mini Magellanic Cloud (MMC) be split?

Mini Magellanic Cloud (MMC) Astrophysicists D. S. Mathewson, V. L. Ford and N. Visvanathan proposed that the SMC may in fact be split in two, with a smaller section of this galaxy behind the main part of the SMC (as seen from Earth’s perspective), and separated by about 30,000 light years.

Why didn’t the ancient Chinese use the Magellanic Clouds for navigation?

Those sources used several stars in the southern sky for navigation, but they never used the Magellanic Clouds: they were too diffuse. The Chinese also would have seen the Clouds when they navigated around India to reach the Arab world, whom they had longstanding ties with.

What is the Magellanic Bridge?

A continuous stream of stars travels from the Small Magellanic Cloud to the Large Magellanic Cloud and is referred to as the Magellanic Bridge. The selection is chosen such that also the SMC is partly visible in the LMC selection, thus allowing to study the Magellanic Bridge as well.