It is "only" about 200,000 light years away (or 9.46 trillion kilometres, so do the sums and the answer is: a long way away but only in earthly terms).

But scientists from the Australian National University and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation have been viewing the galaxy's death in more detail than was previously possible.

This "dwarf galaxy" is called the Small Magellanic Cloud and is called "dwarf' because it is relatively small at only a few billion stars compared with our own Milky Way's hundreds of billions of stars, including the sun.

The ANU and CSIRO scientists have been watching the expulsions of gas from the Small Magellanic Cloud as it writhes in its slow and lingering death.

Galaxies, they reckon, are formed from gases and when they die, gas is expelled in clouds so big they can barely be comprehended.

But they can be "seen" by the radio emissions they make and which are detected by CSIRO's Pathfinder radio telescope.

ANU's lead researcher on the project, Professor Naomi McClure-Griffiths, said the features of the radio images were more than three times finer than previous images.

That, she said, allowed the team to get better information on the way galaxies come to their end. It helps our understanding of the way galaxies come to exist and die, giving more information about how our own galaxy came into being.

“We were able to observe a powerful outflow of hydrogen gas from the Small Magellanic Cloud,” Professor McClure-Griffiths from the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at ANU said.

“The implication is the galaxy may eventually stop being able to form new stars if it loses all of its gas. Galaxies that stop forming stars gradually fade away into oblivion. It’s sort of a slow death for a galaxy if it loses all of its gas.”

Does it have any practical implications that might change the way we lead our lives here on earth? Probably not but it is new information and the accumulation of information is the basis of the science on which human progress is built.

Professor McClure-Griffiths told The Canberra Times that we all like to know what is going on around us.

"We are curious as human beings," she said. "We like to know what's around us, where the shops are and so on. We like to know what is in our neighbourhood".

The Small Magellanic Cloud is a galaxy in our neighbourhood and we now know a bit more about it. The new knowledge confirms, Professor McClure-Griffiths said, that "Australia is a world leader in radio astronomy".