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Credit: M.HEYDARI-MALAYERI & NASA/ESA

The Hubble Space Telescope has been used to record a group of 50 young, ultra-bright stars 200,000 light years away in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). They are believed to be the youngest massive stars ever seen in the SMC. Each star is around 300,000 times brighter than the Sun.

The discovery (right) will sharpen the picture astronomers have of how stars formed in distant galaxies after the Big Bang, says Mohammad Heydari-Malayeri of the Paris Observatory, who heads the team of astronomers that made the discovery. The SMC stars, like those before them, are made up mostly of hydrogen and helium.