Less than 160,000 light-years away from Earth is the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.
This incredible infrared radio image, taken by the Herschel Space Observatory, peers through murky clouds to reveal the thermal glow of expanses of dust, undetectable to the human eye. Hydrogen gas, the most common element in the Universe, is shown in red.
The bubbles of empty space indicate regions where stars have recently formed. Intense winds from these newborn stars have blown away surrounding dust and gases, leaving an accumulation of cool dust around the edges, shown in green. Warmer dust, potentially where stars are forming, is shown in blue.
“These improved Herschel images show us that the dust ‘ecosystems’ in these galaxies are very dynamic,” says Christopher Clark, an astronomer at the Space Science Telescope Institute.