[imagesource: ESO/S. Brunier – ESO / Wikipedia]

Don’t worry, there are no actual spiders in space.

At least not that we know of.

There is, however, the hairy Tarantula Nebula, which has just been captured by NASA’s Webb.

Being 161 000 light-years away was no problem for the highly sensitive James Webb Space Telescope, which captured the cosmic arachnid in stunning detail.

The Tarantula Nebula is the nickname for 30 Doradus, sitting in the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy, which you can see in the top right-hand corner of the southern skies image above.

Those two irregular dwarf galaxies up top, together with our Milky Way Galaxy, belong to the so-called Local Group of galaxies, and according to NASA, the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy is the “largest and brightest star-forming region in the Local Group”.

The spidery name is inspired by the appearance of the dusty filaments in the nebula, which resembles a burrowing tarantula’s home lined with its silk:

Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team

With the Phantom Galaxy somewhere out there, too, it seems space is rather Halloweeen-y.

The nebula has long been a favourite for astronomers studying star formation as it houses the hottest and most massive stars known to astronomers.

These astronomers are excited to study the plethora of young stars, distant background galaxies, and detailed structure and composition of the nebula’s gas and dust, all thanks to the Webb telescope, reported CNN:

The Webb telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera, also called NIRCam, has helped researchers see the region “in a new light, including tens of thousands of never-before-seen young stars that were previously shrouded in cosmic dust,” according to NASA.

In the nebula’s cavity, centred in the NIRCam image, you can see these young stars sparkle pale blue in the image.

Only the densest surrounding areas of the nebula resist erosion by the stars’ strong winds, forming pillars that seem to point back toward the cluster and hold forming protostars.

These protostars emerge from their “dusty cocoons” and help shape the nebula. The Webb telescope’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) caught a very young star doing that, which changed astronomers’ previous beliefs about that star.

Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team

“Astronomers previously thought this star might be a bit older and already in the process of clearing out a bubble around itself,” according to NASA. “However, NIRSpec showed that the star was only just beginning to emerge from its pillar and still maintained an insulating cloud of dust around itself.

The Tarantula Nebula is also of great fascination to astronomers because its chemical composition is similar to the gigantic star-forming regions observed at the universe’s “cosmic noon”, which refers to the time the cosmos was only a few billion years old and star formation was at its peak.

Because the Tarantula is the closest example of what was happening in the universe as it reached its brilliant high noon, it is easier to study this cosmic moment in satisfactory detail.

Humans have been looking up at the stars for yonks, but still, the star-formation process holds many mysteries.

[sources:cnn&nasa]