In the vastness of space, large galaxies like the Milky Way, our galaxy, attract smaller galaxies.

Our solar system’s cosmic neighborhood spans 100,000 light-years and contains between 100 billion and 400 billion stars. Our galaxy is so large that, over billions of years, its mass has captured many dwarf galaxies, which in turn contain billions of stars, as satellites.

Hey, exactly how many satellite galaxies does the Milky Way have? Nobody knows.

The Sun and Earth are on the outskirts of our Milky Way Galaxy. Thus he, as we look at him lengthwise, appears to form a milky, luminous band of many stars, which crosses the sky from one side of the horizon to the other.

The number is constantly changing as new telescopes reveal ever fainter galaxies.

But let’s start with what we can easily see. Two of the prominent satellite galaxies of the Milky Way are the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Small Magellanic Cloud.

They orbit our galaxy about 160,000 light-years away and are visible from the southern hemisphere without a telescope, according to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

the Large Magellanic Cloud

The Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite of our Milky Way Galaxy. It is about 163,000 to 168,000 light years from Earth.

However, such high-visibility galaxies are the exception rather than the rule. Most satellite galaxies are so small and faint that they are invisible to all but the most powerful telescopes.

Scientists find dwarf galaxies by using instruments with a wide field of view to capture as much of the sky as possible, said Or Graur, associate professor of astrophysics at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom.

“As telescopes get bigger and our instruments get better, we can get into fainter and fainter dwarf galaxies, what are now called extremely faint dwarfs,” which have just a few hundred thousand stars, Graur told Live Science .