The Large Magellanic Cloud, or LMC, is a small
companion galaxy of our own Milky Way. It
can be seen with the naked eye, as a faint
grey blotch in the constellation of Dorado.
It’s a favourite hunting ground for astronomers
and it has been studied by many telescopes.
Its most dramatic feature is the Tarantula
Nebula, a bright region of glowing gas and
energetic star formation.
Hubble has produced a close-up view of this
nebula, which reveals this dynamic region
of our Universe in unprecedented detail.
This part of the Tarantula Nebula is one of
its most dynamic, showing the area around
the supernova remnant NGC 2060.
These wispy tendrils of dust and gas are the
only visible remnant of a star which has exploded.
After puffing out these smoky remains, the
core of the star that formed NGC 2060 collapsed
into a pulsar, which is a type of neutron
star.
The Tarantula nebula glows brightly because
the atoms in its hydrogen gas are excited
by the bright, newborn stars that have recently
formed here.
These toddler-stars shine forth with intense
ultraviolet radiation that ionises the gas,
making it light up red and green.
The light is so intense that although around
170 000 light-years distant, and outside the
Milky Way, the Tarantula Nebula is nevertheless
visible without a telescope on a dark night
to Earth-bound observers.
But the biggest and brightest stars in the
Tarantula are actually just outside Hubble’s
field of view.
This wider, but less detailed view of the
Tarantula Nebula was taken with the MPG/ESO
2.2-metre telescope, at La Silla Observatory
in Chile. It shows us the source of much of
the Tarantula’s light: the super star cluster
RMC 136.
So it wasn’t in fact that long ago that
astronomers were still debating whether this
intense light came from a compact star cluster,
or perhaps from an unknown kind of super-star.
It’s only been in the past 20 years that
we have been able to prove that it is indeed
a star cluster — albeit one that hosts some
of the most massive stars that have ever been
observed.
The Tarantula Nebula also hosts the Supernova
1987a. Now, of all the supernovae that have
been observed since the invention of the telescope,
this one is by far the closest to us.
Pulling further back, the size of the Tarantula
Nebula relative to its host galaxy becomes
clear. It is the brightest known star forming
region in the local Universe and one of the
most attractive spots in the night sky.
