A giant space tarantula has been caught by a Webb -- NASA's highly sensitive James Webb Space Telescope, that is.
At 161,000 light-years away from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy, the Tarantula Nebula is the nickname for 30 Doradus, the "largest and brightest star-forming region in the Local Group, the galaxies nearest our Milky Way," according toResembling a burrowing tarantula's home line with its silk, it houses the hottest and most massive stars known to astronomers, according to NASA.
The densest surrounding areas of the nebula resist erosion by the stars' strong winds, forming pillars that seem to point back toward the cluster and hold formingThese protostars emerge from their "dusty cocoons" and help shape the nebula. The Webb telescope's Near-Infrared Spectrograph caught a very young star doing that, which changed astronomers' previous beliefs about that star.
"Without Webb's high-resolution spectra at infrared wavelengths, this episode of star formation in action could not have been revealed." The Tarantula Nebula has long been a focus of astronomers studying star formation because it has a chemical makeup similar to that of the gigantic star-forming regions at the universe's cosmic noon -- when the cosmos was just a feel billion years old and star formation was at its peak, according to NASA.
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