The James Webb Space Telescope has delivered a spectacular and unprecedented view of a star-forming region known as the Tarantula Nebula.
A combination of the James Webb Space Telescope’s high-resolution infrared instruments reveal thousands of never-before-seen young stars in the stellar nursery, formally named 30 Doradus.
The incredible new detail picked up by the $10 billion space telescope shows gas and dust in the nebula, as well as distant background galaxies.
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The superb new detail in the image means Doradus 30, initially nicknamed Tarantula for its spider-like appearance, can now be seen to also resemble a burrowing tarantula’s lair, lined with silk.
The photo is the latest in a series of stunning images released from JWST, which launched on Christmas Day 2021 and released its first pictures in July. Recent images include a perfectly formed “Einstein ring.”
The Tarantula Nebula is located 161,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud and is the brightest star-forming region in the galaxies nearest to our Milky Way, collectively known as the Local Group.
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The nebula is of special interest to astronomers studying how stars form. The nebula has a similar type of chemical composition as star-forming regions from when the cosmos was only a few billion years old, thus offering a unique insight into how stars formed in the deep cosmic past.
JWST is a collaboration led by NASA with contributions from the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.
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