The image shows a young cluster of stars named NGC 346, which is located the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), a dwarf galaxy near the Milky Way more than 200,000 light-years from Earth.
NGC 346 is interesting to astronomers because it resembles the conditions of the early universe when the majority of stars formed.
For this reason, astronomers believe studying this region could help shed light on how the first stars formed during the “cosmic noon”, which is only two or three billion years after the Big Bang.
"We're seeing the building blocks, not only of stars but also potentially of planets," said Guido De Marchi, of the European Space Agency, and a co-investigator on the research team.
“And since the Small Magellanic Cloud has a similar environment to galaxies during cosmic noon, it’s possible that rocky planets could have formed earlier in the Universe than we might have thought.”
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