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The Tarantula Nebula
Deep in the heart of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC; a small companion galaxy to our own Milky Way) is a tremendous cloud of gas called the Tarantula Nebula. For about the past five million years, the Tarantula has been busily turning itself into stars. Very busily-- just in its center, the nebula has converted enough gas to form the mass equivalent of 15,000 Suns, and far more are being formed over the nebula as a whole. Because this is one of the largest and closest star forming regions known, it has long been subject to intense scrutiny by astronomers.
This picture was taken by the University of Michigan using the Big-Throughput Camera. The giant gas cloud spans the roughly 1500 light year field of this image. The bright center of the nebula can be seen in the center left of the image. The star which eventually blew up to become Supernova 1987A was born in this cloud to the lower right.