The Large Magellanic Cloud is a dwarf galaxy, satellite of the "Milky Way". It is 160,000 light years away and for this reason it is one of the closest galaxies to ours. The Large Magellanic Cloud has a mass equivalent to about 10 billion times that of the Sun, equal to about a tenth of the mass of the Milky Way, therefore it contains about 20 billion stars and has a diameter of about 14,000 light years. Together with the Andromeda Galaxy, the Milky Way and the Triangulum Galaxy, it forms the so-called Local Group. It is visible to the naked eye as a faint object in the night sky of the southern hemisphere of the Earth, on the border between the constellations of Dorado and Mensa. It is named in honor of Ferdinand Magellan who observed it together with its companion (called Small Magellanic Cloud) on his voyage of circumnavigation of the Earth.
