Space 5

N90 is located in the wing of the Small Magellanic Cloud, in the constellation of Tucana, approximately 200,000 light-years away from the Earth. Its proximity makes it an exceptional laboratory to perform in-depth studies of star formation processes and their evolution in an environment close to that in the early Universe. Dwarf galaxies such as the Small Magellanic Cloud, with small numbers of stars compared to our own Milky Way, are considered to be the primitive building blocks of larger galaxies. The study of star formation within this dwarf galaxy is particularly interesting to astronomers because its primitive nature means that it lacks a large percentage of the heavier elements that are forged in successive generations of stars through nuclear fusion.