Star Nursery

Photograph courtesy NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

A black-and-white Hubble Space Telescope image shows the swirling, dusty nebula of a massive star-forming region within the Small Magellanic Cloud galaxy, just outside the Milky Way. Nearby "stellar nurseries" like these offer astrophysicists a laboratory for studying how stars and galaxies form and for understanding what the young universe may have looked like.