Everyone has heard of moons.
Satellites are objects that orbit the planets.
It is as natural as the moon and has artificial satellites like ISS and Insat.
Small objects orbiting large objects are commonly called moons.
Similarly, smaller galaxies orbiting larger galaxies are called satellite-galaxies.
That satellite galaxy will also contain billions of stars. But it’s only going to be a galaxy ten times bigger than them.
Near our galaxy are about thirty other galaxies, large and small. These are collectively called “Local Group”.
Of these, our galaxy Milky Way and the next galaxy, Andromeda, are the largest galaxies.
Others are smaller.
So many of these smaller galaxies are orbiting larger ones. They are called satellite-galaxies.
Our galaxy contains many satellite galaxies. The largest of these is the Large Magellanic Cloud.
It is about 163,000 light-years away. It is about one hundredth the size of the Milky Way.
Unlike our spiral galaxy, it does not have a clean spiral shape. Its spiral shape changed as a result of Milky Way and other galaxies trying to pull it away.
In addition to the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), there are several dwarf galaxy moons orbiting our galaxy – at least ten.
Satellite galaxies do not orbit like normal moons for long. Instead, they will one day merge into the larger galaxies Milky Way and Andromeda!
It will merge with Andromeda and Milky Way to form a single large galaxy.
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