Cool Facts
A satellite galaxy. The Large Magellanic Cloud orbits around the Milky Way just like the Moon orbits Earth, except instead of being near our planet, it's a whole galaxy circling ours.
Really far away. It sits about 50 kiloparsecs from Earth, which is roughly 163,000 light-years. That means light from the LMC takes 163,000 years to reach us.
A dwarf galaxy. Even though it sounds big, the Large Magellanic Cloud is actually much smaller than the Milky Way, with only about one-hundredth of its mass.
Fourth largest nearby. In our Local Group of galaxies, only three galaxies are bigger: Andromeda, the Milky Way, and the Triangulum Galaxy.