Hubble snaps close-up
26. Tarantula Nebula
of the
Hubble has taken this stunning close-up shot of part of the Tarantula Nebula.
This star-forming region of ionised hydrogen gas is in the Large Magellanic
Cloud, a small galaxy which neighbours the Milky Way. It is home to many
extreme conditions including supernova remnants and the heaviest star ever
found. The Tarantula Nebula is the most luminous nebula of its type in the
local Universe.
Credit: NASA, ESA
“This region is called the Tarantula Nebula (cause the dust
filaments on an image with a simple telescope have
the appearance of the arms of a spider). At the very
heart of the nebula sits a star cluster that is hosting many
massive stars, several of them, as we now know are a few
hundred times the mass of our Sun, much larger than was
widely assumed. At the moment we are using one of the
spectrographs (an instrument that unravels the light into
different wavelengths to truly reveal the scientific data
imprinted in the light) to study the properties of these
extreme beasts in the center of the nebula in a program
lead by P. Crowther. We would like to know if they are
single stars, or maybe they are binaries.
“We want to know if they rotate like normal stars do. We
want to know what chemical elements we see at their
surface. We want to know how they radiate. We want to
know about the strong winds they blow of their surface.
And all the