The power of three will let us see nasahubble, Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory worked together to display this dazzling portion of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), also known as the Wing. In this composite image, the Chandra data is shown in purple, optical data from Hubble is shown in red, green, and blue, and infrared data from Spitzer is shown in red. The SMC is a small galaxy about 200,000 light-years away that orbits our own Milky Way spiral galaxy: it’s one of our closest galactic neighbors. Even though the SMC is a dwarf galaxy, it is so bright that it is visible to the unaided eye from the Southern Hemisphere and near the equator. Because the SMC is so close and bright, it offers an opportunity to study phenomena that are difficult to examine in more distant galaxies. Data from Chandra’s observations of the SMC resulted in the first detection of X-ray emission from young stars with masses similar to our Sun outside our Milky Way galaxy. Image d...