Hubble Captures Stunning New View of the Tarantula Nebula

The Hubble Space Telescope has been churning out scientific revelations for more than 30 years, and remarkably, it still works. The new James Webb Space Telescope might be more capable. However, Hubble still has an edge over all the ground-based telescopes on Earth, as evidenced by its latest observations of the Tarantula Nebula.

This image is the result of two separate observing proposals. One team sought to analyze the properties of dust grains floating around between stars — a proposal dubbed Scylla by the Hubble team. Those are the wispy dark clouds spread across the Hubble image. The second proposal, called Ulysses, aims to determine how interstellar dust interacts with starlight under various conditions. One observation, twice the science. You can download the full image on the ESA Hubble site, including the original 89MB TIFF.

The Tarantula Nebula is the brightest star-forming region in our part of the universe. It’s hard to accurately measure the extent of the Tarantula Nebula from our location, but astronomers believe it’s between 654 and 1,800 light-years in diameter. The Tarantula Nebula is not actually in our galaxy, though. It sits 161,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy orbiting the Milky Way. It’s technically what’s known as an H II region, composed mainly of ionized hydrogen gas. In places like the Tarantula Nebula (also known as 30 Doradus), hydrogen condenses and fuels the birth of new stars. This makes the nebula an ideal place to study stellar evolution and formation.

The new James Webb Space Telescope has also observed the Tarantula Nebula. That telescope’s larger segmented mirror and infrared instruments produce an amazingly crisp image that reveals stars that even Hubble cannot see. However, time on Webb is in even shorter supply than Hubble, and there are efforts underway that could ensure NASA has two active space telescopes for as long as possible.

When NASA launched Hubble in 1990, it only expected the observatory to last 15 years. It has now been observing the universe for 32 years and nine months. NASA has extended the mission several times, but Hubble hasn’t gotten a service mission since 2009, before the retirement of the Space Shuttle. Hubble is currently funded through 2026, but the spacecraft could fall into the atmosphere by the late 2020s or early 2030s. NASA recently announced it was working with SpaceX on the potential to use a Crew Dragon to perform a servicing and orbital boost operation that could keep Hubble operating for even longer.

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