Spectacular New Images Reveal Violence Inside The ‘Tarantula Nebula’ As The Most Massive Stars We’ve Ever Found Are Born

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This composite image shows the star-forming region 30 Doradus, also known as the Tarantula Nebula. … [+] The background image, taken in the infrared, is itself a composite: it was captured by the HAWK-I instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), shows bright stars and light, pinkish clouds of hot gas. The bright red-yellow streaks that have been superimposed on the image come from radio observations taken by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), revealing regions of cold, dense gas which have the potential to collapse and form stars. The unique web-like structure of the gas clouds led astronomers to the nebula’s spidery nickname.

ESO, ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/Wong e

One of the brightest and most active star-forming regions in our galactic neighborhood—hosting some of the most massive stars known—has been has been revealed in a new image from the European Southern Observatory (ESO).

Using new observations by its Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescopes in Chile astronomers were able to unveil intricate details of the Tarantula Nebula’s wispy gas clouds that provide insight into how massive stars shape this region.

What is the Tarantula Nebula?

The Tarantula Nebula—also called 30 Doradus—is about 160,000 light-years distant and a famous target for astrophotography. At its heart are some of the most massive stars known, a few with more than 150 times the mass of our Sun, making the region perfect for studying how gas clouds collapse under gravity to form new stars.

“What makes 30 Doradus unique is that it is close enough for us to study in detail how stars are forming, and yet its properties are similar to those found in very distant galaxies, when the Universe was young,” said Guido De Marchi, a scientist at the European Space Agency (ESA) and a co-author of the paper presenting the new research. “Thanks to 30 Doradus, we can study how stars used to form 10 billion years ago when most stars were born.”

A kind of super-massive version of the Orion Nebula, it’s is one hundred times larger and the biggest star-forming region in our part of the Universe. It’s so luminous that if it was as close to us as the Orion Nebula is (about 1,300 light years), it would cast a shadow on Earth at night.

This image shows the star-forming region 30 Doradus, also known as the Tarantula Nebula, in radio … [+] wavelengths, as observed by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). The bright red-yellow streaks reveal regions of cold, dense gas which have the potential to collapse and form stars. The unique web-like structure of the gas clouds is characteristic of the Tarantula Nebula.

ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/Wong et al.

What does the new image show?

The astronomers knew that its center is forming massive stars so used ALMA to study a larger region of the Tarantula Nebula, revealing large, wispy and cold gas clouds that collapse to give birth to new stars.

“These fragments may be the remains of once-larger clouds that have been shredded by the enormous energy being released by young and massive stars, a process dubbed feedback,” said Tony Wong, professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who led the research presented Friday at the American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting and published in The Astrophysical Journal.

The team were expecting to find that parts of the cloud closest to the young massive stars would show the clearest signs of gravity being overwhelmed by feedback. “We found instead that gravity is still important in these feedback-exposed regions—at least for parts of the cloud that are sufficiently dense,” said Wong.

This infrared image shows the star-forming region 30 Doradus, also known as the Tarantula Nebula, … [+] highlighting its bright stars and light, pinkish clouds of hot gas. The image is a composite: it was captured by the HAWK-I instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA).

ESO, M.-R. Cioni/VISTA Magellani

Where is the Tarantula Nebula?

The Tarantula Nebula is extra-galactic object. It’s within the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), an irregular dwarf galaxy that orbits our Milky Way galaxy and will be absorbed by it in 2.4 billion years. The LMC contains about 30 billion stars.

The LMC and SMC

The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and the nearby Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) are dense star-fields that appear to the naked eye as fuzzy patches. Although they’re both circumpolar, they’re best seen from equatorial regions and the southern hemisphere when highest in the sky on a dark, moonless night between September and April. They’re found between the stars Canopus and Achernar.

They were named after Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, who spotted them in 1519 while circumnavigating the globe for the first time.

This chart shows the location of the dramatic star formation region known as the Tarantula Nebula in … [+] the constellation of Dorado (The Dolphinfish). This map shows most of the stars visible to the unaided eye under good conditions, and the the region of sky covered by this image is shown with a red rectangle. The Tarantula is visible to the naked eye and the whole region is spectacular through a telescope.

ESO, IAU and Sky & Telescope

Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.

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