In the astronomy field, the term “nearby” is quite relative. Neighboring galaxies to our home galaxy, the Milky Way, are a few million light-years away. In contrast, some of the most distant galaxies ever detected, closer to the Big Bang, are billions of light-years away. In some cases, the ability to study nearby objects at an extremely high resolution can help astronomers better understand more distant objects.

Take star-forming region NGC 604 as one example. Located 2.73 million light-years away in the nearby Triangulum galaxy, this region is similar to familiar starbirth regions in our Milky Way galaxy, such as the Orion Nebula, but it is much larger in extent and contains many more recently formed stars. Such regions are small-scale versions of more distant “starburst” galaxies, which underwent an extremely high rate of star formation.