Spidery star factory gets multi-wavelength makeover

Ken Croswell, contributor

(Image: X-ray: NASA/CXC/PSU/L.Townsley et al.; Optical: NASA/STScI; Infrared: NASA/JPL/PSU/L.Townsley et al.)

Ever wanted to see a star factory in a new light? This fantastic multi-wavelength view of the highly productive stellar nursery, the Tarantula Nebula, combines data from the Spitzer, Hubble, and Chandra telescopes.

Despite residing in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy much smaller than ours, the Tarantula is notable because it spans a much larger distance than any known stellar nursery in the entire Local Group of more than 70 galaxies, which includes the Milky Way.

It's a mystery how a stellar nursery - a cloud of gas that churns out new stars - in a modest galaxy manages to outdo nurseries in giants like the Milky Way and Andromeda, but we can still enjoy this new, false-colour image.? Red shows infrared light, green shows visible, and blue shows X-rays. The latter arise from gas that gets heated by supernova explosions and stellar winds from hot young stars.

The spidery-looking Tarantula grabbed the spotlight recently when astronomers discovered that it hosts the fastest spinning normal star ever seen, with a rotation rate of 600 kilometres per second. It was also not far from the Tarantula that astronomers saw the famous supernova 1987A explode 25 years ago.

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