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Tarantula Nebula
Tarantula Nebula
Star Clusters On a Collision Course |
Astronomers using data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have caught two clusters full of massive stars that may be in the early stages of merging. The clusters are 170,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy to our Milky Way.
What at first was thought to be only one cluster in the core of the massive star-forming region 30 Doradus (also known as the Tarantula Nebula) has been found to be a composite of two clusters that differ in age by about one million years.
The entire 30 Doradus complex has been an active star-forming region for 25 million years, and it is currently unknown how much longer this region can continue creating new stars. Smaller systems that merge into larger ones could help to explain the origin of some of the largest known star clusters.
Lead scientist Elena Sabbi of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., and her team began looking at the area while searching for runaway stars, fast-moving stars that have been kicked out of their stellar nurseries where they first formed. “Stars are supposed to form in clusters, but there are many young stars outside 30 Doradus that could not have formed where they are; they may have been ejected at very high velocity from 30 Doradus itself,” Sabbi said. continue reading
Tarantula Nebula
Photo of the day: Hubble marks 22 years in orbit with stellar image
In celebration of the 22nd anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope on April 24, 1990, NASA has released this stunning new image of the Tarantula Nebula, also known as 30 Doradus. Located about 160,000 light-years from Earth, 30 Doradus is one of the largest, brightest and most prolific star nurseries in the Milky Way. It’s so bright that if it were as close to the Earth as the Orion Nebula — located 1,500 light-years away — it would fill up a space equivalent to 60 moons in our night sky and would also cast shadows on the surface of the planet.
(Source: infinity-imagined)
Tarantula Nebula
