Hubble Captures a Tarantula
- Hubble has captured an incredible image of the Tarantula Nebula, a star-forming factory located 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
- The Tarantula Nebula is home to massive stars, some 200 times as massive as our Sun, and features rare types of stars like Wolf-Rayet stars that have lost their outer shell of hydrogen.
- Hubble’s multiwavelength capabilities allowed it to capture sculptural details in the nebula’s dusty clouds, thanks to its observing program called Scylla, which investigates the structures of gas and dust surrounding massive young stars.
- The Tarantula Nebula is a frequent target for Hubble due to its unique features, including dense and furious stellar winds that power the star-forming region.
- This image showcases Hubble’s ability to explore the mysteries of star formation, revealing the birth and death of stars through the ethereal veils of gas and dust in nebulae like the Tarantula Nebula.
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Hubble Captures a Tarantula
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image captures incredible details in the dusty clouds of a star-forming factory called the Tarantula Nebula. Most of the nebulae Hubble images are in our galaxy, but this nebula is in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy located about 160,000 light-years away in the constellations Dorado and Mensa.
The Large Magellanic Cloud is the largest of the dozens of small satellite galaxies that orbit the Milky Way. The Tarantula Nebula is the largest and brightest star-forming region, not just in the Large Magellanic Cloud, but in the entire group of nearby galaxies to which the Milky Way belongs.
The Tarantula Nebula is home to the most massive stars known, some roughly 200 times as massive as our Sun. This image is very close to a rare type of star called a Wolf–Rayet star. Wolf–Rayet stars are massive stars that have lost their outer shell of hydrogen and are extremely hot and luminous, powering dense and furious stellar winds.
This nebula is a frequent target for Hubble, whose multiwavelength capabilities are critical for capturing sculptural details in the nebula’s dusty clouds. The data used to create this image come from an observing program called Scylla, named for a multi-headed sea monster from Greek mythology. The Scylla program was designed to complement another Hubble observing program called ULLYSES (Ultraviolet Legacy Library of Young Stars as Essential Standards). ULLYSES targets massive young stars in the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, while Scylla investigates the structures of gas and dust that surround these stars.
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Media Contact:
Claire Andreoli (claire.andreoli@nasa.gov)
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
