Hubble Spies Tarantula Nebula's Starry Web As Space Telescope Anniversary Approaches (PHOTO)

By: SPACE.com Staff
Published: 04/17/2012 10:03 AM EDT on SPACE.com

A stunning new photo from the Hubble Space Telescope has captured an unprecedented panoramic view of the Tarantula nebula, revealing its bright heart of massive stars.

The photo is actually a colossal mosaic — one of the largest ever built from Hubble images — and shows an intense star-forming hotspot called 30 Doradus. Hubble's science team unveiled the image today (April 17) ahead of the 22nd anniversary of the iconic space telescope's launch on April 24, 1990.

"30 Doradus is the brightest star-forming region in our galactic neighborhood and home to the most massive stars ever seen," Hubble telescope officials wrote in an image description. "No known star-forming region in our galaxy is as large or as prolific as 30 Doradus."

Hubble's new view of the region inside the Tarantula nebula shows massive stars' winds carving cavities into gas clouds, creating "a fantasy landscape of pillars, ridges and valleys," Hubble officials explained. The spectacular colors are created by glowing hot gas. Hydrogen appears as red while oxygen shows up in blue. [See Hubble's new Tarantula nebula photos  ]

The image covers an area about 650 light-years across that includes so many stars that their mass would add up to millions of our own sun if combined, they added. (One light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles, or 10 trillion kilometers).

The Tarantula nebula is located 170,000 light-years from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the smaller satellite galaxies that hover around our own Milky Way. Inside the nebula is 30 Doradus, which, because of its local proximity to our galaxy, has long been a cosmic laboratory of sorts for astronomers studying how stars are born and evolve.

The most massive runaway star ever seen and one of the fastest rotating stars are just two of the region's tenants, Hubble researchers said. Star clusters from 2 million to 25 million years old can also be found.  

The furious pace of star birth inside 30 Doradus is partly fueled by the Large Magellanic Cloud's neighbor, the Small Magellanic Cloud. In the Hubble view, various stages of the star life cycle are evident, ranging from embryonic stars a few thousand years old to stellar giants that live fast and die young in supernova explosions.

These four Hubble Space Telescope views are part of a massive mosaic of the Tarantula nebula released on April 17, 2012. They show: the young star cluster NGC 2070 (top left), star cluster NGC 2060 (bottom left), Hodge 301 star cluster (top right), and the region RMC 136, which is home to massive stars.

The bright, shining heart of 30 Doradus is a star cluster called NGC 2070 that astronomers suspect is relatively young,  just 2 million or 3 million years old. The cluster is filled with about 500,000 stars and has a dense core that includes some of the most massive stars in the universe. It's these mega-stars, which can contain more than 100 times the mass of the sun, that carve the stunning shapes into the gas clouds of 30 Doradus, researchers said.

To generate Hubble's new view of the Tarantula nebula, astronomers combined observations from the space telescope's powerful Wide Field Camera 3 and its Advanced Camera for Surveys. A total of 30 scans of the region, 15 per camera, were recorded in October 2011 to create the image. Observations from a telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile augment the already spectacular view.

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• Spectacular Photos From The Revamped Hubble Telescope
• Most Amazing Hubble Discoveries
• Hubble: Young Galaxies Burst with Stars

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Comments

[BluePhantom2]

06:24 PM on 04/19/2012

Very cool glad NASA is doing more than weather predictions!

[OhioPaul]

03:08 PM on 04/18/2012

I used to project images from the Hubble telescope images from its website in biology classes, when I taught high school science for a few years. Some students didn't look up at all, and one even commented, "What does all this have to do with biology?" Most did show interest, though not with the awe I detect in these comments. Too immature, too green to recognize what is truly awesome. I did it for the same reason I showed biology clips and films, to break up the media. I also did it because I also simply thought that the Hubble Website is possibly the best site on the web.

[IglooUsher]

02:48 PM on 04/18/2012

I hope that it's someday soon that the government finally admits that there is extraterrestrial life.

[FreedToChoose]

11:56 PM on 04/18/2012

Yawn...

[SMITTY81]

02:12 PM on 04/18/2012

How anyone can look at these pictures and think that man made Science can ever explain our existence is beyond me.

[palindrom]

10:44 PM on 04/18/2012

Science doesn't try to explain existence in the way you're probably thinking of. All it does is try to come up with reliable knowledge and ideas to understand how things happen, and how they came to be. Questions of "why?", as in "for what ultimate purpose?", are not readily answered with the methods of science.

Now, HOW all this came to be, is another story. There we have an amazingly detailed picture of much of the evolution of the universe. There is a huge amount we don't understand, but what we do understand is simply wonderful.

[FreedToChoose]

11:58 PM on 04/18/2012

Please look it up. Science is the study of natural phenomena. It has nothing to do with explaining existence... that's for religious speculation which transcends all evidence.

[lensamy]

02:05 PM on 04/18/2012

Amazing and beautiful. Also if there is life outhere and if they are smart they should stay away, humans... we tend to destroy everything that we touch.

[William Patriot]

03:15 AM on 04/18/2012

There is life out there. Look up the Drake Equation.This came from the greatest astronomers in my lifetime. So many stars must have billions of planets in our Galaxy. So many Galaxies with probably trillions of planets. Some has to have life.Some life forms could be millions of years more advanced.

[talari]

01:46 PM on 04/18/2012

If there is life elsewhere in the universe, we will soon be traveling to far away worlds, meeting exciting new beings, learning their cultures, and killing them.

[r8dj]

02:11 AM on 04/18/2012

The Hubble is one spectacular piece of technology and a fitting tribute to one of the greatest astronomers of all time. For those of you who love these pics, you really should check out some of the galleries of the HST's images. The ones aboves are average compared to some of the other nebulae it's captured.

[trishamine]

12:22 AM on 04/18/2012

Space is SOO lonley looking out there and that frightens me so very much, that's why I hope there IS life some where out there. But Space is quite beautiful. Those photoes up above are sutable to hang on a wall as an art piece. I don't care for modern decor..but those photoes above I would hang on my walls.

[uniqumm]

11:01 PM on 04/17/2012

"one of the smaller satellite galaxies that hover around our own Milky Way" -

Hover?

Oh yeah, this is from Space.com!

[palindrom]

10:46 PM on 04/18/2012

Yeah, it's orbiting. The LMC has a large negative radial velocity, though I don't think that means we need to duck.

[uniqumm]

11:30 PM on 04/18/2012

If memory serves me, some were trying to work out the proper motion. Are you aware of any success?

[uniqumm]

10:55 AM on 04/19/2012

Re- ADS: it feels like UNIX thinkers produced it!
LOL

[Janet Kay Julien]

07:46 PM on 04/17/2012

"The heavens declare the glory of God..." never more true than now

[FactYouAll]

10:50 PM on 04/17/2012

Funny, I always thought that science understood exactly how astronomic objects and phenomena are / were created, and that god played no part in that process.

I actually find nature to be incredibly beautiful, from small objects like flowers, colorful insects, and such; up to the massive objects we see at night and via our telescopes.

Enjoy!

[trishamine]

12:26 AM on 04/18/2012

And you really don't think that God had anything to do with creating any of this?? Like setting the motion in progress and then sit back and watch (sort of?) I REALLY don't believe that all of this is random, not for one second!

[CarlIII]

07:38 PM on 04/17/2012

The Hubble Space Telescope is worth every cent we have spent on NASA.

[FactYouAll]

11:02 PM on 04/17/2012

Excellent idea; no question about it in my mind.

[CarlIII]

08:27 AM on 04/18/2012

F&F.. Thanks.. there a lot of us that think that. Those who say our Space Program has been a waste of money are the same people that love their cell phones, their GPS, their PCs and MACs and satellite TV. And have no idea the role that NASA played in making all those things possible.

[RichieB]

10:06 AM on 04/18/2012

Worth every penny X 100. Hubble has been a tremendous scientific success.

[listgirl3]

07:36 PM on 04/17/2012

Gorgeous!!

[mrlrd]

07:28 PM on 04/17/2012

You are looking at billons and billions of stars like our sun. Do you really believe that if there is advanced life out there with transportation ability, they would somehow pick this lonely planet that circles our lonely sun to visit? REALLY??

[JShankel]

08:31 PM on 04/17/2012

Sure.  If there are advanced space faring civilizations and they knew about us, I imagine we'd be something of a rare find: a planet with a species that can comprehend space travel but has not yet achieved it.

Consider that if such technology is possible, that we are likely to develop it sometime in the next 1,000 - 10,000 years.  That means that the window from agriculture to space travel is on the order of 20,000 years.  Even if it's 100,000 years, that's a blink of an eye in cosmological time.

Most of the lifebearing planets they're bound to find will either be non-technological...dinosaurs and the like...or advanced, having had space travel for a million years or more. 

That we have a certain provincial judgement of ourselves would not matter to them at all. And as for whether our sun is "lonely," well, advanced civilizations are not likely to emerge in star systems that are exciting.  Big, hot burning stars burn out too quickly and more interesting regions of the galaxy experience massive disruption.  Any alien species looking for life is going to be looking at slow burning stars in quiet neighborhoods.

[uniqumm]

11:03 PM on 04/17/2012

Nice to quote "facts" of your own creation and then extrapolate from that!

[uniqumm]

10:34 PM on 04/18/2012

Re Wed, 18 at 21:32:33 response:

My long answer evaporated when I hit the wrong key!

Short ver.-
There are lots of IFs -
IF reasonably fast interstellar travel is possible.
In that case nobody can guess what's worthwhile for them to explore.

IF NOT - Then the best that can be hoped for is robotic, loooong term exploration. Even the multi-generational ships envisioned in the mid-20th century would probably not be feasible due to cumulative radiation exposure.

And forget about handshakes. That would probably kill both!

[FactYouAll]

10:53 PM on 04/17/2012

Well said! I guess your "somehow pick" premise was missed by JShankel, as that post mentions "and they knew about us."

Oh well.

[PleaseNoPolitics]

06:29 PM on 04/17/2012

There's only 10 comments because everyone else is left speechless...

[Waterlooboy]

05:44 PM on 04/17/2012

Breathtaking. It's a curse of humans that we can only look, but can't ever visit. They're too far and we're too fragile.

[serranojacobkael]

06:04 PM on 04/17/2012

That's what you think. Physics can prove that anything, even us can move faster than light. If anything, WE can't go... but our distant descendants may.

[Gas-Bag]

06:16 PM on 04/17/2012

What ??

[CarlIII]

07:48 PM on 04/17/2012

What physics are you referring too? Einstein said that the speed of light is the fastest speed there is. Are you saying Einstein was wrong? Here's a link , you need an education www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/9100009/Scientists-did-not-break-speed-of-light-it-was-a-faulty-wire.html