NGC 604 in Messier 33

Stars are sometimes born in the midst of chaos. About 3 million years ago in the nearby galaxy M33, a large cloud of gas spawned dense internal knots which gravitationally collapsed to form stars. NGC 604 was so large, however, it could form enough stars to make a globular cluster.

Many young stars from this cloud are visible in this image from the Hubble Space Telescope, along with what is left of the initial gas cloud. Some stars were so massive they have already evolved and exploded in a supernova. The brightest stars that are left emit light so energetic that they create one of the largest clouds of ionized hydrogen gas known, comparable to the Tarantula Nebula in our Milky Way's close neighbor, the Large Magellanic Cloud.

Photo credit: NASA

ESO's VLT Finds a Brilliant but Solitary Superstar

This view shows part of the very active star-forming region around the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small neighbor of the Milky Way. At the exact center lies the brilliant but isolated star VFTS 682 and to its lower right the very rich star cluster R 136. The origins of VFTS are unclear — was it ejected from R 136 or did it form on its own? The star appears yellow-red in this view, which includes both visible-light and infrared images from the Wide Field Imager at the 2.2-meter MPG/ESO telescope at La Silla and the 4.1-meter infrared VISTA telescope at Paranal, because of the effects of dust.

Photo credit: ESO/M.-R. Cioni/VISTA Magellanic Cloud survey. Acknowledgment: Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit

Note: For more information, click here.

Wide-Field and Close-Up Views of the Tarantula Nebula

This image shows, on the left, a wide-field view of the Tarantula Nebula, a vast stellar nursery in the Large Magellanic Cloud. This was taken with the Wide Field Imager (WFI) on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at the European Southern Observatory's site at La Silla, Chile. On the right is a narrower, more detailed view of part of the nebula, observed by Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys. The location of the Hubble image is marked by a square near the center of the WFI image.

Photo credits: NASA, ESA, ESO

Note: For more information, see Arachnophobes Beware: Hubble Snaps Close-Up of the Tarantula [heic1105].

The 30 Doradus/Tarantula Nebula Region

This VISTA image shows the spectacular 30 Doradus star-forming region, also called the Tarantula Nebula. At its core is a large cluster of stars known as R 136, in which some of the most massive stars known are located. This infrared image, made with ESO’s VISTA survey telescope, is from the VISTA Magellanic Cloud Survey. The project will scan a vast area — 184 square degrees of the sky (corresponding to almost one thousand times the apparent area of the full Moon), including our nearby neighboring galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. The end result will be a detailed study of the star formation history and three-dimensional geometry of the Magellanic system.

This image was created from images taken through Y, J and Ks filters in the near-infrared part of the spectrum (colored blue, green and red respectively). The exposure times were 40, 47 and 81 minutes per filter respectively. The image covers a region of sky about 52 by 70 arcminutes.

Photo credit: ESO/M.-R. Cioni/VISTA Magellanic Cloud survey. Acknowledgment: Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit

Notes: For more information, see Ambitious Survey Spots Stellar Nurseries. The annotated photograph above points out several features in this particular region of space, including supernova remnant SN 1987A, globular star cluster NGC 2100, NGC 2080 (the Ghost Head Nebula), and open star cluster/emission nebulas NGC 2081 and NGC 2083.

Supermassive Stars in Star Cluster R136a

Using a combination of instruments on ESO’s Very Large Telescope, astronomers have discovered the most massive stars to date, some weighing at birth more than 300 times the mass of the Sun, or twice as much as the currently accepted limit of 150 solar masses. The most extreme of these stars was found in the cluster RMC 136a (or R136 as it is more usually named). Named R136a1, it is found to have a current mass of 265 times that of the Sun. Being a little over a million years old, R136a1 is already “middle-aged” and has undergone an intense weight-loss program, shedding a fifth of its initial mass over that time, or more than fifty solar masses. It also has the highest luminosity, close to 10 million times greater than the Sun.

R136 is a cluster of young, massive and hot stars located inside the Tarantula Nebula, in one of the neighborhood galaxies of the Milky Way, the Large Magellanic Cloud, 165,000 light-years away. R136 contains so many stars that on a scale equivalent to the distance between the Sun and the nearest star there are tens of thousands of stars. Hundreds of these stars are so incredibly bright that if we were to sit on a (hypothetical) planet in the middle of the cluster the sky would never get dark.

This montage shows a visible-light image of the Tarantula nebula as seen with the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope (left) along with a zoomed-in visible-light image from the Very Large Telescope (middle). A new image of the R136 cluster, obtained with the near-infrared MAD adaptive optics instrument on the Very Large Telescope is shown in the right-hand panel, with the cluster itself at the lower right. The MAD image provides unique details on the stellar content of the cluster.

Photo credit: ESO/P. Crowther/C.J. Evans

Update: This post has become popular, and I've noticed that some people have been looking for a comparison between our Sun and this enormous star, R136a1. The below illustration, produced by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), illustrates the size differences between R136a1 and three other stars, one of which is supposed to be similar in size to our Sun:

Illustration credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

NGC 2070 - The Tarantula Nebula

Sending chills down the spine of all arachnophobes is the Tarantula nebula, seen in this image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). Located in the southern constellation of Dorado, the Tarantula nebula is a giant star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy. This irregular dwarf galaxy orbits our Milky Way galaxy. It is relatively close, in galactic terms, at about 160,000 light-years away from Earth. Its motion around the Milky Way causes compression of interstellar dust and gas at is leading edge. This has led to a huge burst of star formation, creating the Tarantula nebula.

At about 1,900 light-years across, the nebula is the largest star-forming region known in our entire Local Group of galaxies, a region encompassing over 30 galaxies, including the great Andromeda. In 1987, the closest supernova observed since the invention of the telescope was seen at the edge of the Tarantula nebula (SN1987A). It was determined to be the violent explosion of a very massive star.

All four infrared detectors aboard WISE were used to make this mosaic. The image spans an area of 1.4 x 1.2 degrees on the sky or about three times as wide as the full moon, and 2.5 times as high. Color is representational: blue and cyan represent infrared light at wavelengths of 3.4 and 4.6 microns, which is dominated by light from stars. Green and red represent light at 12 and 22 microns, which is mostly light from warm dust.

Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA