In a recently released study, data from the joint NASA/European Space Agency (ESA) Hubble Space Telescope and the European Space Observatory’s (ESO) ground-based Very Large Telescope (VLT) has been used to discover young stars spiraling into the center of a star cluster within the Small Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.
Spiral-shaped phenomena are a lot more common in nature than you might think. Hurricanes, protoplanetary disks around stars, and spiral galaxies are all examples of naturally occurring objects that adopt spiral-shaped structures. However, certain elements and environments are required for spiral-like structures to form, so scientists were surprised to find spiral formations of stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud — an irregular, dwarf galaxy located on the outskirts of the Milky Way.