The Tarantula Nebula is a huge HII region in the Southern hemisphere on the edge of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), one of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies, with which we are on a collision course in about 2.4 billion years. It is about 1,000 light years across, and is about 160 to 170 thousand light years away.
Just as the tarantula family (Theraphosidae) are the largest spiders, so is the Tarantula Nebula the largest nebula in the sky, sprawling across an area about the size of the full moon, and to some its illuminated arms around a glowing core resemble the body and legs of a large spider.
The full extent of the Tarantula nebula goes well beyond this image, which focuses on its center. The nebula is the most active starburst region in our local group of galaxies, meaning that stars are being formed and igniting there at a very rapid rate. The cluster of young, hot stars in the center of the image, NGC 2070, number about 500,000 and most are a mere 2 million years old. At its core is a group of about 10,000 massive young stars called R136, whose stellar winds power and ionize the HII superbubbles that comprise the nebula; in fact, according to
this page, just 2 or 3 of these stars produce more than 50% of the radiation that sculpts the nebula.
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