In the "backyard" of the Milky Way, is there a cosmic "spider" with a terrifying appearance?

The Milky Way's Iron Neighbor! Is It Actually a Nebula That Looks Like a Wolf Spider? How Much Life Is Hidden Behind the Magnificent Colors?

This is the latest image of the Tarantula star, which is often called the Tarantula Nebula. The thin "spider web" on its surface shows the ongoing "battle for supremacy" between the nebula's gravity and the huge energy that explodes. Its existence helps astronomers understand how these stars shape the place where they were born and why they still remain in an explosive state in the molecular cloud. (Image source: Southern Observatory, ALMA Telescope/Wang Ente'ao, Southern Observatory/MR Coney/VISTA Magellanic Cloud Telescope.)

This high-resolution image of the Tarantula Nebula, 17,000 light-years away, was created using data collected by the ALMA. Located in the Magellanic Clouds, a satellite of the Milky Way in our galaxy's backyard, the Tarantula Nebula is the brightest star-forming system we can see, and one of the most active star-forming systems - some with stars more than 150 times the mass of our sun.

That is to say, at the center of this huge Magellanic Cloud lies a "stellar nursery" where nearly 800,000 stars are born - more than 500,000 of which are hot, young, and massive stars.

These young stars are not only the top targets for researchers who want to study stellar data, but they also offer exciting prospects. "The Tarantula Nebula is unique in that it is close enough to allow us to study the principles of star formation, and it provides us with values ​​similar to those of some of the oldest stars that we have access to at close range," said Dodimach, a scientist at the European Space Agency and co-author of the paper. "Thanks to the Tarantula Nebula, we can now understand how stars formed more than 10 billion years ago, when most stars were still in their infancy."

The long battle to create massive stars

The "push" and "pull" in the universe that the researchers discovered comes from the gravitational pull of a large number of stars, tearing former gaseous nebulae into chains of fragments, showing data related to the effects on early stars, and evidence of later attempts by these effects to fuse the matter together again to create new stars.

"These fragments should have been torn from the nebula by the enormous energy emitted by newborn stars, a process we often call cosmic feedback," said Tony Wang, a professor in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Illinois, in a press release at the Southern Observatory.

The findings suggest that while the star is constantly feeding back matter, gravity is also continually shaping the Tarantula Nebula, which is 170,000 light-years away next to our Milky Way galaxy, leading the shape of the surrounding giant stars. This conclusion overturns the consensus on how such giant stars change shape, which was that small amounts of gas in the Tarantula Nebula disrupted the process by which gravity brought matter together to form new stars.

"Based on our results, we can speculate," said Tony Wang. "Even with this strong stellar material feedback, gravity can still play a huge role in keeping the star evolving."

The Tarantula Nebula was observed to be clumping together

This close-up of the Tarantula Nebula imaged with radio waves highlights the hot gas and bright stars in the closer part of the frame (Image credit: NASA, Mr. Sioni/Vesta Magellanic Cloud Research)

Given its value, it's no surprise that the Tarantula Nebula has been studied so intensively. Unlike previous studies, which mostly focused on the center of the nebula - where the density of stars is highest and changes most rapidly - this led scientists to realize that these stars are forming in other areas of the Tarantula Nebula. Fortunately, these scientists collected a large number of high-resolution images of large areas of the Tarantula Nebula without focusing the lens on its center. Using this comprehensive approach, they then separated it into clumps, revealing a surprising pattern.

"We previously thought that interstellar gas clouds would be puffy or round, but now it is becoming clear that they should be cone-shaped or strip-shaped," said Tony Wang in a press release from the National Astronomical Observatory. "When we break the interstellar cloud into small clusters and measure their masses, we can see that the locations of the densest clusters are not random, but are highly organized based on the locations of the fragments."

The Tarantula Nebula draws material from interstellar clouds formed by the collapse of old stars as new stars form, and scientists used this principle to locate the interstellar cloud through light waves absorbed by carbon monoxide in the interstellar cloud. Scientists also discovered how interstellar clouds change when young stars release huge amounts of energy.

The team's findings have given scientists insights into how gravity affects star-forming regions, and advances in this research are being made all the time. "We still have a lot to do with this huge and spectacular database. We are now making it available to the public to encourage other researchers to conduct new studies," Wang said.

Future research will focus on differences between the Milky Way and the Tarantula Nebula, including the rate of star formation—because while our Milky Way forms stars at a steady pace, the Tarantula Nebula has "rapid bursts of star growth."

The study of the Tarantula Nebula was presented at the 240th Astronomical Society Meeting in Pasadena on June 15. The findings were also published in the Astrophysical Journal.

BY:Robert Lea

FY:E-Orange

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