The Large Magellanic Cloud revealed by VISTA

A barred irregular galaxy is an irregular version of a

barred spiral galaxy A barred spiral galaxy is a spiral galaxy with a central bar-shaped structure composed of stars. Bars are found in about two thirds of all spiral galaxies in the local universe, and generally affect both the motions of stars and interstellar gas ...

. They have a bar-shaped structure in the middle of an otherwise irregular shape. Examples include the

Large Magellanic Cloud The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is a dwarf galaxy and satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. At a distance of around , the LMC is the second- or third-closest galaxy to the Milky Way, after the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy, Sagittarius Dwarf ...

(LMC) and NGC 6822,Norbert Przybilla, ''Quantitative Spectroscopy of Supergiants'', Munich, 2002
/ref> although LMC is more often classified as a

magellanic spiral galaxy A Magellanic spiral galaxy is a spiral galaxy with only one spiral arm. Magellanic spiral galaxies are classified as the type Sm (with sub-categories SAm, SBm, SABm); the prototype galaxy and namesake for Magellanic spirals is the Large Magellani ...

. Some barred irregular galaxies (like the Large Magellanic Cloud) may be

dwarf spiral galaxies A dwarf spiral galaxy is the dwarf version of a spiral galaxy. Dwarf galaxies are characterized as having low luminosities, small diameters (less than 5 kpc), low surface brightnesses, and low hydrogen masses. The galaxies may be considered a s ...

, which have been distorted into an irregular shape by

tidal interactions The tidal force or tide-generating force is the difference in gravitational attraction between different points in a gravitational field, causing bodies to be pulled unevenly and as a result are being stretched towards the attraction. It is the d ...

with a more massive neighbor.

References

* * Galaxy morphological types {{galaxy-stub