NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope recently observed a ‘Cosmic Tarantula,’ or a stellar nursery called 30 Doradus. This Tarantula Nebula got its name from the dusty filaments seen in previous telescope images and is located 161,000 light-years from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy.
To capture these images, astronomers had to focus three of Webb’s high-resolution infrared instruments on the Tarantula Nebula. When observed with Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), the section looks like burrowing tarantula’s home that has been lined with its silk. The nebula’s cavity captured by NIRCam has essentially been hollowed out by intense radiation from a cluster of massive young stars, which are the blue dots in the image. The pillars you see contain forming protostars, which are going to eventually emerge from their dusty cocoons and begin haping the nebula. Speaker of spiders, did you know that real Spider-Sense technology actually exists?
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At the longer wavelengths of light captured by its Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), Webb focuses on the area surrounding the central star cluster and unveils a very different view of the Tarantula Nebula,” said NASA.
