Our own spiral-shaped galaxy, the Milky Way, is named for its spilled-milk appearance to the unaided eye across Earth’s nighttime sky. Indeed, the very word “galaxy” derives from the Greek galaxias, “milky.” Our pair of nearest-neighbor galaxies, 600,000 light-years distant, are both small and irregularly shaped. Ferdinand Magellan’s ship’s log identified these cosmic objects during his famous round-the-world voyage of 1519. In his honor, we call them the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, and they are visible primarily from the Southern Hemisphere as a pair of cloudlike splotches on the sky, parked beyond the stars. The nearest galaxy larger than our own is two million light-years away, beyond the stars that trace the constellation Andromeda. This spiral galaxy, historically dubbed the Great Nebula in Andromeda, is a somewhat more massive and luminous twin of the Milky Way. Notice that the name for each system lacks reference to the existence of stars: Milky Way, Magellanic Clouds, Andromeda Nebula. All three were named before telescopes were invented, so they could not yet be resolved into their stellar constituencies.

Our own spiral-shaped galaxy, the Milky Way, is named for its spilled-milk
appearance to the unaided eye across Earth’s nighttime sky. Indeed, the very word
“galaxy” derives from the Greek galaxias, “milky.” Our pair of nearest-neighbor
galaxies, 600,000 light-years distant, are both small and irregularly shaped.
Ferdinand Magellan’s ship’s log identified these cosmic objects during his famous
round-the-world voyage of 1519. In his honor, we call them the Large and Small
Magellanic Clouds, and they are visible primarily from the Southern Hemisphere
as a pair of cloudlike splotches on the sky, parked beyond the stars. The nearest
galaxy larger than our own is two million light-years away, beyond the stars that
trace the constellation Andromeda. This spiral galaxy, historically dubbed the
Great Nebula in Andromeda, is a somewhat more massive and luminous twin of
the Milky Way. Notice that the name for each system lacks reference to the
existence of stars: Milky Way, Magellanic Clouds, Andromeda Nebula. All three
were named before telescopes were invented, so they could not yet be resolved
into their stellar constituencies.