Geometry
The Large Magellanic Cloud has a prominent central bar and a spiral arm. The central bar seems to be warped so that the east and west ends are nearer the Milky Way than the middle.
The LMC was long considered to be a planar galaxy that could be assumed to lie at a single distance from us. However, in 1986, Caldwell and Coulson found that field Cepheid variables in the northeast portion of the LMC lie closer to the Milky Way than Cepheids in the southwest portion. More recently, this inclined geometry for field stars in the LMC has been confirmed via observations of Cepheids, core helium-burning red clump stars and the tip of the red giant branch. All three of these papers find an inclination of ~35°, where a face-on galaxy has an inclination of 0°. Further work on the structure of the LMC using the kinematics of carbon stars showed that the LMC's disk is both thick and flared. Regarding the distribution of star clusters in the LMC, Schommer et al. measured velocities for ~80 clusters and found that the LMC's cluster system has kinematics consistent with the clusters moving in a disk-like distribution. These results were confirmed by Grocholski et al., who calculated distances to a number of clusters and showed that the LMC's cluster system is in fact distributed in the same plane as the field stars.
Read more about this topic: Large Magellanic Cloud
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