Stars shine amidst a luminous, cotton-candy nebula in this new image of NGC 346, the largest star-forming region in our neighboring galaxy, the Small Magellanic Cloud.

The star cluster, located about 210,000 light-years away and measuring around 200 light years across, is home to a group of brilliant stars.

Many of the stars in the nebula are just a few million years old. These young suns were born when gusting winds from a massive star compressed a huge amount of matter, which then collapsed under its own gravity. The collapse created extremely dense hot spots that fueled the birth of new stars.

Light, wind and heat have whipped up gases in and around the cluster to form the pink-and-blue wispy cloud. Stars burning inside the nebula have made the surrounding gas hot enough to glow.

The new image was taken by the Wide Field Imager instrument on the 7.2-foot telescope at the at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. The image was captured using blue, violet and red filters, in addition to a narrow-band filter tuned to see the light emitted by hydrogen in gas clouds.

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