The Tarantula Nebula in Infrared: A Spitzer Space Telescope Portrait

The Tarantula Nebula, also called 30 Doradus, is a glowing cloud of dust and gas where stars are being born at a furious rate. It lies in the Large Magellanic Cloud — the nearest galaxy to our own Milky Way — and is seen mainly from the Southern Hemisphere. NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, once known as the Space Infrared Telescope Facility, photographed its spidery filaments and young stars in fine detail, capturing a snapshot of the physics and chemistry that govern how stars are born and how they die.

A cluster of giants

At the nebula’s center sits R136, a compact cluster of very young, very massive stars. The brightest are blue supergiants up to 100 times the Sun’s mass and at least 100,000 times its brightness. Stars like these burn fast and die young, by astronomical standards: they use up their nuclear fuel within a few million years.

Seeing through the dust

Spitzer took the picture with its infrared array camera, which detects light invisible to our eyes, at wavelengths about ten times longer than visible light. The image combines four of those wavelengths, each assigned a color:

The area shown is three-quarters the size of the full Moon. Because infrared light passes through dust, Spitzer could see into the Tarantula’s clouds and find places where stars are forming that had been hidden from view.

Holes, pillars and colors

The nebula is riddled with holes. They are blown out by powerful winds streaming from the massive stars of the central cluster. The edges of these voids are especially interesting: dense pillars of gas and dust, shaped by the stars’ radiation, mark where future generations of stars will form.

Spitzer’s image also hints at what those edges are made of. The surface layers nearest the big stars receive the strongest radiation, which strips atoms of their electrons. The green in those regions comes from this highly excited, or ionized, material. The red filaments found throughout the picture show molecular material believed to be rich in hydrocarbons.

A nearby starburst

The Tarantula is the closest example of a starburst, in which stars form in intense episodes on an enormous scale. Most starbursts are found in dusty, distant galaxies, so this one gives astronomers an unusually clear view of the life cycle of massive stars and of how they shape the birth of new stars and planetary systems.

Sources

Based on "The Tarantula Nebula" (PIA05062), a NASA Spitzer Space Telescope image release; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Cover image from the same NASA release.