A Companion's Glittering Beehive

We live in the Milky Way, a gigantic galactic disk of stars, gas, and dust. Our galaxy also has several smaller companion galaxies, mostly elliptical and irregular dwarf galaxies. One of them is called the Large Magellanic Cloud, about 160,000 light-years away. It's fairly irregular, though recent studies have shown it may have used to be a small barred spiral galaxy. I have studied a bit of this galaxy (it was the host of a star that blew up in 1987 which was the subject of my Ph.D. work), but ...