Astronomers have released a bounty of striking images at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas. A number of space telescopes that "see" in the infrared, beyond wavelengths that we can see, have given unprecedented insight into the workings of star-forming regions.

This and the prior image are from the Wide-field Infrared Surveyor: halves of a vast swathe of the Milky Way. Nasa's Xavier Koenig said that "the infrared lights up right where these massive star-forming regions are doing their work... They pop out immediately to your eye. I can't wait to look at more of the Wise sky coverage."

When the Spitzer space telescope took a look at the CygnusX star-forming region, it found some 28,000 new young stellar objects. "If we want to learn how our Sun formed, we have to study the formation of stars that are forming now," said Joe Hora of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. At top left of the image...

...can be found hints of one of the mechanisms of star formation. A huge star at the centre of this image is surrounded by a rim of ionised gas. Such massive stars trigger the formation of a number of smaller stars as gas expands outward.

The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (LMC/SMC) are galactic neighbours of our own Milky Way. Here, a Herschel and Spitzer space telescope image of the SMC shows the raw material for star formation: the "interstellar medium" contains gas and dust that coalesce until massive enough to kick-start the fusion of starlight.