A Stellar Bouquet for Valentine's Day: Nebula 30 Doradus | NASA Chandra
By combining X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory with optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope, infrared data from Spitzer, and radio data from ALMA, this stellar arrangement comes alive.
Otherwise known as the Tarantula Nebula, 30 Doradus is located about 160,000 light-years away in a small neighboring galaxy to the Milky Way known as the Large Magellanic Cloud, or LMC for short. As one of the brightest and crowded star-forming regions close to Earth, 30 Doradus is a frequent target for scientists trying to learn more about how stars are born.
With enough fuel to have powered the manufacturing of stars for at least 25 million years, 30 Doradus is the most powerful stellar nursery in the local group of galaxies that includes the Milky Way, the LMC, and our neighboring Andromeda galaxy.
The massive young stars in 30 Doradus send cosmically strong winds out into space. Along with the matter and energy ejected by stars that have previously exploded, these winds have carved out an eye-catching display of arcs, pillars, and bubbles.
A dense cluster in the center of 30 Doradus contains the most massive stars astronomers have ever found, each only about one to two million years old. For comparison, our Sun is over a thousand times older with an age of about 5 billion years.
This new image includes the data from a large Chandra program that involved about 23 days of observing time, greatly exceeding the 1.3 days of observing that Chandra previously conducted on 30 Doradus. The roughly 3,600 X-ray sources detected by Chandra include a mixture of massive stars, double-star systems, bright stars that are still in the process of forming, and much smaller clusters of young stars.
There is a large quantity of diffuse, hot gas seen in X-rays, arising from different sources including the winds of massive stars and from the gas expelled by supernova explosions. This data set will be the best available for the foreseeable future for studying diffuse X-ray emission in star-forming regions.
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