The near-infrared vision of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has given us a new view deep inside the Tarantula Nebula - and its more than 800,000 stars and protostars within.

Also known as 30 Doradus, the Tarantula Nebula is a region of star birth that resides 170,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small, satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. The Tarantula Nebula's vigorous star birth may be fueled partly by gas stripped from the Small Magellanic Cloud. One question researchers hope to answer is whether super-massive stars always form in clusters, or whether they can be born in isolation. Because it contains the nearest observable super-cluster of stars, the nebula is a nearby laboratory for seeing close-up a firestorm of star birth that was much more common in the early universe. Hubble can resolve individual stars and many red protostars as well as aging red giants and supergiants, giving astronomers new insights into the stars' birth and evolution.








These regions will likely merge into larger clusters.


Presented at the 223rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society at National Harbor, Md. Source: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center