The Tarantula Nebula in nearby Large Magellanic Cloud Galaxy | Hubble

The Tarantula Nebula in nearby Large Magellanic Cloud Galaxy | Hubble

A scene from a star-forming factory shines in this NASA/European Space Agency Hubble Space Telescope picture. It captures incredible details in the dusty clouds in a star-forming region called the Tarantula Nebula. What is possibly the most amazing aspect of this detailed image is that this nebula is not even in our galaxy. Instead, it is in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a dwarf galaxy that is located about 160,000 light-years away in the constellations Dorado and Mensa. 

The Large Magellanic Cloud is the largest of the dozens of small satellite galaxies that orbit the Milky Way. The Tarantula Nebula is the largest and brightest star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, and within the entire group of nearby galaxies that the Milky Way belongs to.

The Tarantula Nebula is home to the most massive stars known—a portion are roughly 200 times as massive as our Sun. The scene pictured here is located away from the center of the nebula, where there is a super star cluster called R136, but very close to a rare type of star called a Wolf–Rayet star. Wolf–Rayet stars are massive stars that have lost their outer shell of hydrogen and are extremely hot and luminous, powering dense and furious stellar winds.

This nebula is a frequent target for Hubble, whose multiwavelength capabilities are critical for capturing sculptural details in the nebula’s dusty clouds. The data used to create this image come from an observing program called Scylla. It is named for a multi-headed sea monster from the Greek myth of Ulysses. The Scylla program was designed to complement another Hubble observing program called Ultraviolet Legacy library of Young Stars as Essential Standards (ULYSSES). It targets massive young stars in the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, while Scylla investigates the structures of gas and dust that surround these stars.

Image Description: A nebula. The top-left is dense with layers of fluffy pink and greenish clouds. Long strands of green clouds stretch out from here; a faint layer of translucent blue dust combines with them to create a three-dimensional scene. A sparse network of dark dust clouds in the foreground adds reddish-black patches atop the nebula. Blue-white and orange stars, from our galaxy and beyond, are spread amongst the clouds.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Murray
Release Date: Aug. 4, 2025

#NASA #Astronomy #Hubble #Space #Science #Nebulae #TarantulaNebula #StellarNursery #Stars #WolfRayetStars #Dorado #Constellation #LargeMagellanicCloud #LMC #DwarfGalaxies #Cosmos #Universe #HubbleSpaceTelescope #HST #GSFC #STScI #UnitedStates #ESA #Europe #STEM #Education

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