WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Glowing gold at its center and ringed by a purplish halo, a nearby galaxy holds a vast, stellar nursery with dusty and clean areas for newborn stars, a new Hubble Space Telescope (news - web sites) image showed on Thursday.

The new composite picture of galaxy NGC 1512 was made with light at various wavelengths, from infrared to ultraviolet, and shows a monster area -- 2,400 light-years across -- filled with clusters of infant stars.

A light-year is about 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in a year. The galaxy itself is about 30 million light-years away, relatively close by cosmic standards.

Israeli and U.S. researchers studying the image found that in NGC 1512, infant stars exist in both dusty and clean environments, NASA and the European Space Agency said in a statement.

The clean clusters are readily seen in ultraviolet and visible light, appearing as bright, blue clumps in the image, while the dusty clusters are revealed only by the glow of the gas clouds in which they are hidden, as detected in red and infrared wavelengths by the Hubble cameras.

The researchers' results will be published in the June issue of the Astronomical Journal