Close Encounter with The Tarantula Nebula: 30 Doradus | Hubble Space Telescope

Close Encounter with The Tarantula Nebula: 30 Doradus | Hubble Space Telescope

Turning its 2.4-meter eye to the Tarantula Nebula, the NASA/European Space Agency Hubble Space Telescope captured this close-up of the outskirts of the main cloud of the Nebula. The bright wispy structures are the signature of an environment rich in ionized hydrogen gas, called H II by astronomers. In reality these appear red, but the choice of filters and colors of this image, including exposures in visible and infrared light, make the gas appear green.

These regions contain recently formed stars that emit powerful ultraviolet radiation that ionizes the gas around them. These clouds are ephemeral as eventually the stellar winds from the newborn stars and the ionization process will blow away the clouds, leaving stellar clusters like the Pleiades.

Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of our neighboring galaxies, and situated at a distance of 161,000 light-years light-years away from Earth, the Tarantula Nebula is the brightest known nebula in the Local Group of galaxies. It is also the largest (around 650 light-years across) and most active star-forming region known in our group of galaxies, containing numerous clouds of dust and gas and two bright star clusters.

The cluster at the Tarantula Nebula’s center is relatively young and very bright. While it is outside the field of view of this image, the energy from it is responsible for most of the brightness of the nebula, including the part we see here. The nebula is in fact so luminous that if it were located within 1,000 light-years from Earth, it would cast shadows on our planet.

The Tarantula Nebula was host to the closest supernova ever detected since the invention of the telescope, supernova 1987A. It was visible to the naked eye.

The image was produced by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, and has a field of view of approximately 3.3 by 3.3 arcminutes.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA 
Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt
Release Date: Aug. 6, 2012

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