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This ring of gas and dust is embedded with swirls of star formation and pockets of mature stars. The whole setup is known to astronomers as a nebula, and it is about 1,000 light-years wide.
The nebula is catalogued as N11. It resides in the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is not just a cloud but actually a nearby galaxy and the largest galaxy considered to be a satellite to our own Milky Way.
The Large Magellanic Cloud is about 180,000 light-years away in a universe that spans billions of light-years. A light-year is the distance light travels in one year, about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers).
N11, like many other nebulas, is loaded with gas and dust that's blown into wispy shapes by activity from stars. Notice at the center is a fairly tight grouping of stars; it's called an open star cluster (named LH9, and also NGC 1760).
The bright white knots are regions of intense star formation.
The image was taken with the Curtis Schmidt telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO).
-- SPACE.com Staff
Credit: C. Aguilera, C. Smith and S. Points/NOAO/AURA/NSF
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