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These multiwavelength images of the Tarantula Nebula, one of the brightest and largest regions of star formation to Earth, show X-rays from Chandra that reveal gas that has been blown away in winds from the surfaces of young, massive stars and heated to millions of degrees by shock waves, like sonic booms from supersonic jets

Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Ohio State Univ./J. Rodriguez et al; Infrared: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/P. Edmonds​

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​A new study of the Tarantula Nebula is answering questions about why this star formation region in the Large Magellanic Cloud is losing energy from its center.

By combining data from Chandra, Hubble and Webb, and Spitzer, researchers identified what has tamed the Tarantula and where the energy has gone.

This new composite image has layers from three of these telescopes: Chandra (blue), Hubble (green), and Webb (red).

Scientists have concluded that energy has been lost through leakage of gas, the mixing of hot and cold gas and by conduction of heat.

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Like a collage made of layered sheets of colored cellophane, a vibrant new image layers observations of a famous star-forming nebula from NASA space telescopes. The resulting cosmic “craft” reveals new details about the star formation region known as 30 Doradus, or the Tarantula Nebula.

Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small neighbor galaxy to the Milky Way about 160,000 light-years from Earth, the Tarantula has thousands of young stars embedded in a vibrant honeycomb-like structure of gas and dust.

The new composite image contains X-rays from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, which has repeatedly observed the Tarantula Nebula over the course of its mission, in the layer that appears in blue. The X-ray data reveals gas blown away by winds from the surfaces of young, massive stars and heated to millions of degrees by shock waves, like sonic booms from supersonic jets.

The red represents infrared data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope showing thousands of young stars, plus swaths of cool dust that will provide the ingredients to form new stars and planets. Optical data in the green layer from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope uncovers hydrogen gas that is warmer than seen with Webb, as well as some individual stars through the nebula.

The composite image shows the full Hubble and Webb images of this region, as well as a large section of the Chandra image, all recently published in a research paper in the Astrophysical Journal. In some regions the blue Chandra layer stands alone, and in others it combines with either the red Webb data or the green Hubble data. In the middle region all three images overlap to provide a holistic view in red, orange, yellow, green, and blue.

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More

https://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2026/30dor/

Paper

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ae3c7a

Tarantula Nebula shines in new Chandra, Hubble and Webb view