The two Magellanic Clouds are irregular dwarf galaxies orbiting our Milky Way galaxy, and thus are members of our Local Group of galaxies.The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and its neighbour and relative, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) are conspicuous objects in the southern hemisphere, looking like separated pieces of the Milky Way to the naked eye.

Observation, and theoretical evidence suggests that the LMC and SMC have been greatly distorted by tidal interaction with the Milky Way as they orbit around it; streams of neutral hydrogen connect them to the Milky Way and to each other, and both resemble disrupted barred spiral galaxies.

However, their gravity has affected our Galaxy as well, distorting the outer parts of the galactic disk.

For more information about the topic Magellanic Clouds, read the full article at Wikipedia.org, or see the following related articles:

Local Group — The Local Group (also called M31 group or the Andromeda group) is the group of galaxies that includes our galaxy, the Milky Way. The group comprises ...  > read more

Supergiant — Supergiants are the most massive stars. Supergiants can have masses from 10 to 70 solar masses and brightness from 30,000 up to hundreds of thousands ...  > read more

Barred spiral galaxy — A barred spiral galaxy is a spiral galaxy with a band of bright stars emerging from the center and running across the middle of the ...  > read more

Open cluster — An open cluster is a group of up to a few thousand stars that were formed from the same giant molecular cloud, and are still loosely gravitationally ...  > read more

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