Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Walsh (ST-ECF), and ESO, Acknowledgment: Processing by Z. Levay (STScI)

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has imaged a heavyweight star that may have been kicked out of its home by a pair of heftier siblings in the 30 Doradus nebula. The heavyweight star, called 30 Dor #016, is 90 times more massive than the Sun and is traveling at more than 250,000 miles an hour. The young star, only 1 million to 2 million years old, may have traveled about 375 light-years from its suspected home in R136, and is now located on the outskirts of the nebula. Nestled in the core of 30 Doradus, R136 is one of the most massive young star clusters in nearby galaxies, containing several stars topping 100 solar masses each. 30 Doradus, also called the Tarantula Nebula, resides roughly 170,000 light-years from Earth, in the Large Magellanic Cloud. In the ESO and WFPC2 images, hot stars are represented by the color blue. Hydrogen is in red and oxygen in green. Radiation from the runaway star is making the nebula glow.

Provider: Space Telescope Science Institute

Image Source: https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2010/news-2010-14

Curator: STScI, Baltimore, MD, USA

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