The infrared surveyor AKARI, a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) mission with ESA participation, is nearing the completion of its first scan of the entire sky. During this phase of the mission, it has supplied the largest wavelength coverage of the Large Magellanic Cloud to date, and provided fascinating new images of this galaxy. The Large Magellanic Cloud is a neighbouring galaxy to the Milky Way, the galaxy to which our Solar System belongs. It is located extremely close by astronomical standards, at a distance of 160.000 light years, and it contains about 10 thousand million stars, about one tenth of our Galaxy’s stellar population.
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