The Australian National University (ANU) is part of an international team of astronomers that found one of the Universe's biggest superclusters of galaxies near the Milky Way. nearest galaxies to milky way, ... of years ago, the Milky Way experienced a near collision that churned the ... with the Milky Way would have gravitationally tugged at our galaxy's stars. Master plan of the universe revealed in new galaxy maps In the renderings, our Milky Way galaxy is a tiny speck in the midst of other galaxies and colossal voids. The Magellanic Clouds are irregular dwarf galaxies orbiting our Milky Way galaxy. “So this is the most ‘real’ map of the Milky Way.” 3D structure of the Milky Way. The LMC is 179,000 light years away from the Milky Way. The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy comprised of a bar-shaped core region surrounded by a flat disk of gas, dust and stars about 120,000 light-years wide. The Milky Way, our home galaxy in space, is a vast galaxy containing 400 billion suns, at least that many planets, and a 4-billion-solar-mass black hole at the center. This map is constructed from 2000 Cepheid variable stars, and the yellow dot represents our sun. The LMC is full of interesting objects including diffuse nebulae, globular and open clusters, planetary nebulae, and more.The SMC, also an irregular galaxy, may be a distorted barred disk, deformed by the tidal forces of Milky Way and LMC.. Y. Mao, R. Kaehler / R. Wechsler Two independent teams of astronomers went panning for gold in the Southern Hemisphere sky — and they struck it rich. This image maps eight dwarf galaxy candidates discovered near the Milky Way (red), as well as previously discovered dwarf galaxies (blue).