Large and small stars in harmonious coexistence

Large and small stars in harmonious coexistence (8/14/06)

This is a Hubble Space Telescope image of one of the hundreds of star-forming stellar systems, called stellar associations, located 180,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). The LMC is the second closest known satellite galaxy of our Milky Way, orbiting it roughly every 1.5 billion years. Earlier ground-based observations of such systems had only allowed astronomers to study the bright blue giant stars in these systems, and not the low-mass stars.

Star forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud
Click for 1280×1280 image