Astronomers were able to look at a nursery of stars in the Tarantula Nebula – a colossal cloud of gas and dust neighboring our galaxy – and gain a new understanding of the dynamics of star formation, while also getting a stunning picture of the cosmos.
Researchers said Wednesday that their observations have increased understanding of the interplay between the irresistible force of gravity, which drives star formation, and the immense amounts of energy that young, very massive stars inject into their neighboring environment, which can inhibit the birth of stars.
The Tarantula Nebula resides a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way called the Large Magellanic Cloud. It is a web of stars, gas and dust about 600 light-years across. A light year is the distance light travels in one year, 9.5 trillion kilometers.
Located about 170,000 light-years from Earth, the Tarantula nebula is formally named 30 Doradus, in reference to a catalog number of objects in the direction of the constellation Dorado.
It is called the Tarantula Nebula because part of its architecture has the appearance of glowing filaments of gas, dust and stars that resemble a spider’s legs. The nebula’s gaseous composition is similar to that of the universe at an earlier stage in its history, being made mostly of hydrogen and helium.
The European Southern Observatory has released an image of the Tarantula Nebula showing thin clouds of gas that could be remnants of larger clouds that have been ripped apart by energy unleashed by young, massive stars.
“We see stars forming where there’s a lot of gas and dust available, and there’s definitely a lot of that in the Tarantula nebula,” said astrophysicist Guido de Marchi of the European Space Research and Technology Center at the European Space Agency in the Netherlands, who co-authored the research. published in the Astrophysical Journal and presented at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
The findings were aided by observations made with the Alma Telescope (Atacama Large Millimeter Array), located in Chile.
“Stars form when clouds of gas collapse under their own gravity and the gas gets denser and denser. These clouds contract and heat up until the core is hot enough to start the stellar engine, a huge nuclear reactor. “, said De Marchi.
“But we’ve always thought that when very massive stars — more than a hundred times the mass of the Sun — start to form, they release so much energy that it stops more gas from falling, cutting off the fuel source for more stars to form. The beautiful observations of the Tarantula nebula taken with Alma now show that where gas is dense enough, it continues to fall, and new stars can continue to form. This is interesting and new information.”
De Marchi was referring to a phenomenon called feedback, in which young, massive stars emit large amounts of energy into their local environment in the form of high-speed photons and particles. The nebula’s primordial composition fueled the formation of especially large stars, some of them 200 times more massive than our Sun.
“The Tarantula Nebula is the most extreme feedback environment that we can observe in detail, because it harbors the closest example of a cluster of young, massive stars,” said University of Illinois astrophysicist and study lead author Tony Wong. .
“One of the great puzzles of astronomy is why we can still observe stars forming today. Why didn’t all the available gas collapse in a great burst of star formation that took place and ended a long time ago? Observations with Alma may shed light on the what is happening deep within stars and help us understand how gravity and feedback compete for influence to control star formation,” he added.
The beauty of the nebula has not gone unnoticed by scientists.
“Personally, I love the Tarantula nebula for both scientific and aesthetic reasons,” said De Marchi. “It’s a unique panorama in the sky. I’ve often wondered what the night would look like if we were on a planet orbiting one of its stars, with brightly colored clouds and gaseous streaks across the sky.”
Translation by Clara Allain
