Bug Eyes

Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Walsh (ST-ECF), and ESO

Green bug eyes peer out of a rose-colored mist in this image from NASA’s Hub­ble Space Telescope.

Explore this tiny part of the 30 Doradus neb­ula. What sto­ries and pic­tures do you see in the image? Leave a note below.

30 Doradus is one of the most intense star-forming regions known by astronomers. This image shows a heavy­weight star that may have been kicked out of the nurs­ery by a pair of big­ger stars. The bright blue star, in the cen­ter, is called 30 Dor #016. This huge star is more than 90 times more mas­sive than the Sun. This young star is only 1 mil­lion to 2 mil­lion years old and has trav­eled about 375 light-years from its orig­i­nal home; a star clus­ter that is not in this image. The star is trav­el­ing about 250,000 miles per hour. Intense radi­a­tion from the star lights up the sur­round­ing gas and dust, caus­ing it to glow with a green hue.

30 Doradus, also called the Taran­tula Neb­ula, resides about 170,000 light-years from Earth, in the Large Mag­el­lanic Cloud. If you live in the south­ern hemi­sphere you can see this lit­tle galaxy hang­ing in the sky like a cloud. This cloud and another, called the Small Mag­el­lanic Cloud, are named after the explorer Fer­di­nand Mag­el­lan. Mag­el­lan was the first Euro­pean to sail around the world in the 1500s.