Ethereal clouds of dust and gas are illuminated by stars in the giant elliptical galaxy Centaurus A, captured in unprecedented detail by the Hubble space telescope. The photograph was taken with Hubble's most sophisticated instrument, the Wide Field Camera 3. It combines images from multiple wavelengths to reveal a dusty region of the galaxy.

Visible as a bright jewel in southern skies, Centaurus A lies a mere 11m light years from Earth and has at its heart a supermassive black hole that weighs 55m times as much as the sun. The black hole drives powerful jets of particles to within a whisker of the speed of light, releasing intense bursts of radio waves and x-ray radiation.

As well as dark lanes of dusty material, the composite image reveals features in the ultraviolet light range that emanate from young stars. The warped shape of the galaxy hints at a violent past for Centaurus A, which is likely to have collided and merged with a smaller spiral galaxy 100m years ago. The cataclysmic event created shockwaves that caused hydrogen gas to coalesce and a flurry of new stars to be born. Some of these fledgling stars are seen in the outlying regions and in patches of red in this Hubble close-up.

Centaurus A was discovered in 1826 but was largely ignored for a century by astronomers, who dismissed it as another fuzzy, nebulous object thought to be in our own galaxy.