Hubble's latest image shows the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), a nearby dwarf galaxy visible from Earth without a telescope. Although it appears as just a blurry smudge in the sky, Hubble's high-powered lenses captured stunning detail, showing the stunning interplay between stars and dust.

This stunning image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows one of the Milky Way's closest galactic neighbors, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). This image, taken with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3, shows a star-studded region near the center of NGC 346, where young, massive stars illuminate floating clouds of cosmic dust. Image credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA, C. Murray

Meet one of the Milky Way's closest neighbors! This new Hubble Space Telescope image highlights the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), a dwarf galaxy about 200,000 light-years from Earth. Most of the SMC is located in the constellation Tucana, with a small portion extending into the neighboring constellation Hydra.

Due to its close proximity to Earth, the SMC is one of the few galaxies visible to the naked eye. Observers in the Southern Hemisphere and some northern latitudes can spot it in the night sky, where it appears like a faint, separate part of the Milky Way. But in fact, it extends far beyond the confines of our galaxy.

Astronomers were surprised to find young stars spiraling into the center of a massive star cluster in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. The spiral outer arms of this giant, oddly shaped stellar nursery known as NGC 346 may feed star formation with rivers of gas and stellar motion. Researchers say this is an efficient way to promote the birth of stars. Image source: NASA, ESA, AndiJames (STScI)

With its 2.4-meter "eye" and sensitive instruments, Hubble's observations of the SMC are far more detailed and vivid than anything humans can see. The researchers used Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) instrument to observe the scene through four different filters. Each filter allows different wavelengths of light to pass through, creating colorful images of dust clouds floating across the star field. However, Hubble's field of view is much more magnified than our eyes, allowing it to better observe very distant objects. This image captures a small region of the SMC near the center of NGC 346, a cluster of dozens of massive young stars (see image above).

Compiled from /ScitechDaily