Different wavelengths of light swirl together like watercolors in a new, ethereal portrait of a bright, active star-forming region. The multi-wavelength picture combines X-ray, infrared, and visible light captured by ESA’s XMM-Newton space-borne X-ray observatory, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory's New Technology Telescope. The colorful image offers a fresh look into the history of the star-studded region, called NGC 346, revealing new information on how stars in the Universe form. NGC 346 is the brightest star-forming region in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that orbits the Milky Way, at a distance of 210 000 light-years. Previously, astronomers knew that most of NGC 346's smaller stars were created at the same time as the massive stars located at the center of the region, all out of one dense parent cloud. The intense radiation from the more massive stars ate away at the surrounding dusty cloud, causing gas to expand and compressing cold dust into new stars. This process is known as 'triggered star formation'. The red-orange filaments surrounding the centre of the image show where this process has occurred. But the formation of a set of younger, small stars in the region, seen at the top of the image, could not be explained by this mechanism. Scientists were puzzled by what triggered the formation of this seemingly isolated group of stars. The new image also reveals a bubble, seen as a blue halo to the left, caused by the supernova explosion of the massive star. Analysis shows that this bubble is located within a large, expanding gaseous shell, possibly powered by the explosion and the winds of other bright stars in its vicinity. In this image, infrared light (red) shows cold dust; visible light (green) denotes irradiative gas; and X-rays (blue) represent warm gas.