The Tarantula Nebula, also known as 30 Daradus, and positioned inside the Large Magellanic Cloud that's 170,000 light-years away, has been captured on camera by the Hubble Space Telescope under NASA's Hubble Tarantula Treasury Program.
The Tarantula Nebula contains the nearest observable super-cluster of stars, and star formation within the system began tens of millions of years ago. The Hubble, with its near-infrared vision, can penetrate clouds of dust. The images were captured with Hubble's two cameras, the Wide Field Camera 3 and Advance Camera for Survey.
Images of the Tarantula Nebula have been captured in 2004, 2010, 2011 and 2012, but none of them have been as detailed is the most recent set taken by the two cameras.
Tarantula Nebula is part of the HII region, a large cloud made up of partially ionized hydrogen where new stars are being born. A star cluster known as R136 is positioned left of center on the captured image. It was originally identified as a single star, but now astronomers realize it is a cluster of stars, which generate significant brilliance.
Results from the Hubble Tarantula Treasury Program were published in the Astronomical Journal and exhibited at the American Astronomical Society in Washington, DC, and are being presented at the 223rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society at National Harbor, Md. By the time the program is over, astronomers involved in it will have a huge catalog of stellar properties, which can be used in the study of star formation. The mosaic is currently composed of 438 separate images and spans a width of 600 light-years.
Principal investigator and astronomer Elena Sabbi, from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, said, "Because of the mosaic's exquisite detail and sheer breadth, we can follow how episodes of star birth migrate across the region in space and time."
