NASA TELESCOPES DELIVER STELLAR BOUQUET IN TIME FOR VALENTINE’S DAY

A bouquet of thousands of stars in bloom has arrived. This composite image contains the deepest X-ray image ever made of the spectacular star forming region called 30 Doradus.

By combining X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (represented in blue and green) with optical data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (yellow), infrared data from NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope (red), and radio data from the European Southern Observatory’s Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (orange), this stellar arrangement comes alive.

Otherwise known as the Tarantula Nebula, 30 Dor is located about 160,000 light-years away in a small neighboring galaxy to the Milky Way known as the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC).  As one of the brightest and crowded star-forming regions close to Earth, 30 Dor is frequently studied by scientists trying to learn more about how stars are born.

With enough fuel to have powered the manufacturing of stars for at least 25 million years, 30 Dor is the most powerful stellar nursery in the local group of galaxies that includes the Milky Way, the LMC, and the Andromeda galaxy.

The massive stars in 30 Dor emit highly energetic winds. Along with the matter and energy ejected by stars that have previously exploded, these winds have carved out an eye-catching display of arcs, pillars, and bubbles.

A dense cluster in the center of 30 Dor contains the most massive stars astronomers have ever found, each only about one to two million years old. (Our Sun is over a thousand times older with an age of about 5 billion years.)

This new image includes the data from a large Chandra program that involved about 23 days of observing time, greatly exceeding the 1.3 days of observing that Chandra previously conducted on 30 Dor. The 3,615 X-ray sources detected by Chandra include a mixture of massive stars, double-star systems, bright stars that are still in the process of forming, and much smaller clusters of young stars.

There is a large quantity of diffuse, hot gas seen in X-rays, arising from different sources including the winds of massive stars and from the gas expelled by supernova explosions. This data set will be the most comprehensive available for the foreseeable future for studying diffuse X-ray emission in star-forming regions.

The long observing time devoted to this cluster allows astronomers the ability to search for changes in the 30 Dor’s massive stars. Several of these stars are members of double star systems, and their movements can be traced by the changes in X-ray brightness.

A paper describing these results appears in the July 2024 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series. This paper is part of a collection publishing posthumously the unfinished work by Leisa K. Townsley (Penn State). Her coauthors, Pat Broos (Penn State) and Matthew Povich (California State Polytechnic University), completed the manuscript based on her initial draft, written notes, and private communications. 

NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Chandra X-ray Center controls science operations from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts.

Text & Images: https://chandra.cfa.harvard.edu/photo/2025/30dor/