Close encounter with the Tarantula: Turning its 2.4-metre eye to the Tarantula Nebula, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has taken this close-up of the outskirts of the main cloud of the Nebula. The bright wispy structures are the signature of an environment rich in ionised hydrogen gas, called H II by astronomers. In reality these appear red, but the choice of filters and colours of this image, which includes exposures both in visible and infrared light, make the gas appear green. These regions contain recently formed stars, which emit powerful ultraviolet radiation that ionises the gas around them. These clouds are ephemeral as eventually the stellar winds from the newborn stars and the ionisation process will blow away the clouds, leaving stellar clusters like the Pleiades. Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of our neighbouring galaxies, and situated at a distance of 170 000 light-years away from Earth, the Tarantula Nebula is the brightest known nebula in the Local Group of galaxies. It is also the largest (around 650 light-years across) and most active star-forming region known in our group of galaxies, containing numerous clouds of dust and gas and two bright star clusters. A recent Hubble image shows a large part of the nebula immediately adjacent to this field of view. The cluster at the Tarantula nebula’s centre is relatively young and very bright. While it is outside the field of view of this image, the energy from it is responsible for most of the brightness of the Nebula, including the part we see here. The nebula is in fact so luminous that if it were located within 1000 light-years from Earth, it would cast shadows on our planet. The Tarantula Nebula was host to the closest supernova ever detected since the invention of the telescope, supernova 1987A, which was visible to the naked eye. The image was produced by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, and has a field of view of approximately 3.3 by 3.3 arcminutes. A version of this image was entered into the Hubble’s Hidden Treasures Image Processing Competition by contestant Judy Schmidt. Hidden Treasures is an initiative to invite astronomy enthusiasts to search the Hubble archive for stunning images that have never been seen by the general public. The competition has now closed and the results will be published soon.

Name: 30 Dor, 30 Doradus, 30 Doradus Nebula, NGC 2070, Tarantula Nebula
Type: Local Universe : Nebula : Type : Star FormationLocal Universe : Nebula : Appearance : Emission : H II Region
Category: Nebulae
Constellation: Dorado
Distance: 170000 light years
Release date: 6 August 2012, 10:00
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt

A lonely galactic island: In  terms of intergalactic real estate, our Solar System has a plumb  location as part of a big, spiral galaxy, the Milky Way. Numerous, less  glamorous dwarf galaxies, keep the Milky Way company. Many galaxies,  however, are comparatively isolated, without close neighbours. One such  example is the small galaxy known as DDO 190, snapped here in a new  image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. DDO  190 is classified as a dwarf irregular galaxy as it is relatively small  and lacks clear structure. Older, reddish stars mostly populate DDO  190’s outskirts, while some younger, bluish stars gleam in DDO 190’s  more crowded interior. Some pockets of ionised gas heated up by stars  appear here and there, with the most noticeable one shining towards the  bottom of DDO 190 in this picture. Meanwhile, a great number of distant  galaxies with evident spiral, elliptical and less-defined shapes glow in  the background. DDO  190 lies around nine million light-years away from our Solar System. It  is considered part of the loosely associated Messier 94 group of  galaxies, not far from the Local Group of galaxies that includes the  Milky Way. Canadian astronomer Sidney van der Bergh was the first to  record DDO 190 in 1959 as part of the DDO catalogue of dwarf galaxies.  (“DDO” stands for the David Dunlap Observatory, now managed by the Royal  Astronomical Society of Canada, where the catalogue was created). Although  within the Messier 94 group, DDO 190 is on its own. The galaxy’s  nearest dwarf galaxy neighbour, DDO 187, is thought to be no closer than  three million light-years away. In contrast, many of the Milky Way’s  companion galaxies, such as the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds,  reside within a fifth or so of that distance, and even the giant spiral  of the Andromeda Galaxy is closer to the Milky Way than DDO 190 is to  its nearest neighbour. Hubble’s  Advanced Camera for Surveys captured this image in visible and infrared  light. The field of view is around 3.3 by 3.3 arcminutes A version of this image was entered into the Hubble’s Hidden Treasures Image Processing Competition by contestant Claude Cornen. Hidden Treasures is an initiative to invite astronomy enthusiasts to search the Hubble archive for stunning images that have never been seen by the general public. The competition has now closed and the results will be published soon.

Name: DDO 190, UGC 9240
Type: Local Universe : Galaxy : Size : Dwarf
Category: Galaxies
Constellation: Bootes
Distance: 10 million light years
Release date: 13 August 2012, 10:00
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA