The nearby Small Magellanic Cloud has a hard time producing dust. That’s because this dwarf galaxy has between a fifth and a tenth of the amount of heavy elements that the Milky Way does. Galaxies with lower fractions of metals take longer to form dust, due to the lack of raw materials. The difference in dust composition interests astronomers, since it can help them learn more about what dust was like in the early universe. The Hubble Space Telescope’s observations of the early universe add to what the Webb Space Telescope will ultimately reveal. Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, K. Sandstrom (University of California, San Diego), and the SMIDGE team. ALT-TEXT: The center of the image displays NGC 248, which is a combination of two nebulas, red clouds of gas and dust, that are close to each other. Surrounding it are a massive number of stars and galaxies, which appear as red, green, and blue dots. The brightest stars have plus-sign-shaped diffraction spikes.