Small Magellanic Cloud

galaxy · space · neighbor galaxies

Nearby cosmic neighbor. The Small Magellanic Cloud sits about 200,000 light-years away from Earth, which makes it one of our Milky Way's closest galactic neighbors in the entire universe.

Visible to the naked eye. Even though it's incredibly far away, the Small Magellanic Cloud is one of the most distant objects you can see without a telescope just by looking up at the night sky.

Hundreds of millions of stars. This dwarf galaxy contains several hundred million stars packed together, creating a glowing cloud-like appearance that you can spot from the Southern Hemisphere.

Smaller than our galaxy. The Small Magellanic Cloud is classified as a dwarf irregular galaxy, which means it's much smaller and less organized in shape compared to our Milky Way.

Massive but smaller. Even though it's called small, the Small Magellanic Cloud has a total mass of about 7 billion times the mass of our Sun.