Beautiful Photos of the Tarantula Nebula, 161 Thousand Light Years from Earth

Liputan6.com, Jakarta – The NASA website shares a beautiful photo of the Tarantula Nebula. The photo was shared by NASA on February 3, 2023, and comes from the Hubble Space Telescope.

The distance between planet Earth and the Tarantula Nebula is 161 thousand light years.

“The Tarantula Nebula is a location familiar to Hubble. It is the brightest star-forming region in our galaxy and is home to the hottest and most massive stars,” wrote NASAquoted on Wednesday (8/2/2023).

In September 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope also examined the nebula and found thousands of young stars.

NASA says this new photo was taken while scientists are trying to understand the dust that exists in the darkness between stars.

This observation proposal is called Scylla. As a result, scientists can observe how interstellar dust interacts with starlight in various environments.

The Scylla observations complement another Hubble program called Ulysses which aims to characterize stars.

The new photo also incorporates data from an observation program that studied star formation under conditions similar to those of the ancient universe. Another goal is to catalog the stars in the Tarantula Nebula.

Site Space.com explains that this nebula is in the Large Magellanic Cloud. This nebula is the brightest and largest area of ​​the “Local Group” (the galaxy closest to the Milky Way).

The Tarantula Nebula, which is also called 30 Doradus, is also called by NASA as a favorite location for astronomers to study star formation.