The Small Magellanic Cloud is a dwarf galaxy that is only 200,000 light years away from the Milky Way, about two galactic diameters away. It can be seen from latitudes south of 15°S. The Small Magellanic Cloud is joined by the Large Magellanic Cloud in the sky, separated by about 25 degrees in the sky, or about 75,000 light-years in actual distance. The Magellanic Clouds appear to be shards of the Milky Way. They are among the farthest objects visible with the naked eye, with the Triangulum Galaxy being the farthest at 3 million light years.
The Magellanic clouds were first observed by Europeans during Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe in 1519-1522. The “clouds” in the night sky resemble small glittering clouds, but they are actually galaxies. The Small and Large Magellanic Clouds were thought to be the closest galaxies to the Milky Way until the discovery of the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy in 1994.
The detail of the Small Magellanic Cloud is brought out with a high-powered telescope. It appears to float in space like a blue ribbon of star-studded silk. In comparison to the Milky Way’s 200 billion to 400 billion stars, the Small Magellanic Cloud has only a few hundred million stars. The visible light we see from the Small Magellanic Cloud is 75,000 years old due to its distance. To put it another way, if the Small Magellanic Cloud vanished tomorrow, it would take us 75,000 years to figure out why.
The Magellanic Clouds are irregular galaxies that appear to have started out with a barred spiral structure similar to the Milky Way, but deteriorated over time. It was once assumed that they were both orbited by the Milky Way, but new evidence has revealed that this is not the case. The Magellanic Clouds and the Milky Way are both members of the Local Group, a gravitationally bound family of over 30 galaxies that includes the Andromeda Galaxy and the Triangulum Galaxy.