The Hubble Space Telescope is still trucking along more than 30 years after its launch, observing the universe and sending home images for us to marvel at. This week, NASA and ESA highlighted an image captured by Hubble of the highly productive Tarantula Nebula (officially named 30 Doradus) in the Large Magellanic Cloud, and it’s a sight to behold.
The Large Magellanic Cloud may be only 10-20% as massive as our Milky Way galaxy, but it boasts some of the most impressive star-forming regions in the nearby Universe! 1/3 pic.twitter.com/juulDT44mD
— HUBBLE (@HUBBLE_space) January 23, 2025
The Tarantula Nebula is “the largest and most productive star-forming region in the local universe,” with stars roughly 200 times as massive as the sun at its center, according to NASA. This Hubble view gives us a look at the outskirts of the nebula, revealing layers of colorful gas and stars. The Tarantula Nebula sits within the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby dwarf galaxy.
While the final result we see is filled with brilliant colors, Hubble’s images initially come back in grayscale. As has explained, “scientists can create a composite color image by taking exposures using different color filters on the telescope, assigning a color to each filter that corresponds to the wavelength of that filter, and combining the images.” The new image of the Tarantula Nebula doesn’t just represent visible light, but ultraviolet and infrared too. In such a case, colors are assigned to those wavelengths we can’t normally see.