NASA’s Hubble Telescope captures stunning images of the Trifid Nebula in deep space, nearly 5,000 light-years away from Earth.
THE TAKEAWAY
- NASA released a vibrant new view of the Tarantula Nebula
- The team used the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope to take the image
- The image revealed that the Tarantula Nebula may be losing energy in three ways
NASA released a vibrant new view of 30 Doradus, also known as the Tarantula Nebula, revealing new details about how stars are forming.
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The image, released Aug. 11, combines observations from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope.
Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud in a small galaxy next to the Milky Way about 160,000 light-years from Earth, the Tarantula has thousands of young stars embedded in a honeycomb-like structure of gas and dust.
According to NASA, the blue layer represents X-ray data from Chandra, which has repeatedly observed the Tarantula Nebula throughout its mission.
NASA released a vibrant new view of 30 Doradus, also known as the Tarantula Nebula.
(NASA / NASA)
The X-rays reveal gas blown away by winds from the surfaces of young, massive stars and heated to millions of degrees by shock waves, similar to sonic booms produced by supersonic jets.
The red layer shows infrared data from Webb, revealing thousands of young stars along with large clouds of cool dust that contain the ingredients needed to form new stars and planets.
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Meanwhile, the green layer comes from optical data collected by Hubble, showing warmer hydrogen gas as well as individual stars scattered throughout the nebula.
In a recently published paper, Astrophysical Journal, scientists explain how they expected the Tarantula Nebula to contain hotter X-ray-emitting gas. This is because of the powerful winds that are produced by its young, massive stars.
The image reveals that the Tarantula Nebula may be losing energy in three ways.
(NASA / NASA)
However, Chandra detected less of this hot gas than expected, prompting researchers to investigate where the energy went.
The researchers ended up finding that the Tarantula Nebula may be losing energy in three ways. This may be from hot gas escaping through openings in surrounding shells of gas and dust, hot and cool gases are interacting and lowering the overall temperature, and heat may be transferring directly from the hot gas to cooler material.
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Together, these processes could explain why the Tarantula Nebula is not as hot as scientists expected and provide new insight into how massive stars shape their surroundings.
The combination of these three areas losing large amounts of energy leads to the colorful display that is shown by NASA’s telescopes working together.
