· by drnereide.bsky.social ·1d ago · view on bsky.app ↗

1/7 Combined data from Chandra, #Hubble, and #Webb show this chaotic environment of young stars, hot gas, and dust.🔭 It is about the Tarantula Nebula, or 30 Doradus, a giant H II region in our Local Group.🧪⚛️ A new study explains why the energy from the stellar winds isn't all staying inside.

alt text

Cropped view of the Tarantula Nebula’s colorful core. Translucent layers from Chandra (wispy blue hot gas), Hubble (curling green hydrogen tendrils), and Webb (roiling red dust and young stars) overlap and blend harmoniously into vivid fiery oranges, golden yellows, and deep purples.

#hubble #webb

3 comments — live from bluesky

Leonardo Petrillo · 3 · 7h ago

🔭

Oregon Randy · 1 · 1d ago

I would like to enter this as one of the worst places to have a habitable planet, albeit temporarily habitable.

Nereide · 1 · 17h ago

That’s a fair assessment. 30 Doradus is an extremely hostile environment for planets: any planet forming there would face severe atmospheric erosion and radiation doses that make long-term habitability highly unlikely, even on short timescales.

Nereide · 6 · 1d ago

2/7 The massive stars in R136, its central star cluster, blow extremely powerful winds. Classical models predict these winds heat the gas enough to make it glow in X-rays. But observations show less X-ray emission than expected. Where does that energy go?

Nereide · 7 · 1d ago

3/7 The team combined multiwavelength data from the three telescopes (and Spitzer spectral energy distributions) and found three main pathways. First: the shells of gas and dust are fragmented. Up to about half of the hot gas manages to filter out and escape the region.

Nereide · 7 · 1d ago

4/7 Second possibility: turbulent mixing occurs at the interface between hot and cold gas. This effectively cools the material and lowers the overall temperature. The brightness profiles clearly show this: X-rays peak within the Hα shells and then decrease.

Nereide · 7 · 1d ago

5/7 Third possibility: thermal conduction. When hot gas and colder, denser material touch, heat is transferred. The authors note, however, that this hypothesis arises primarily from comparison with simulations, which do not yet accurately reproduce all the observed details.

Nereide · 8 · 1d ago

6/7 There is no direct correlation between the temperature of the hot gas and the dust. The dust appears to be mostly located in the shells and is heated by stellar radiation, not so much by collisions with the X-ray gas. An interesting and important result.

Nereide · 8 · 1d ago

7/7 References - iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3... - chandra.cfa.harvard.edu/photo/2026/3... Image Credit: NASA/CXC/Ohio State (X-ray, J. Rodriguez et al.), NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI (Webb & Hubble), processing by NASA/CXC/SAO