NASA's Hubble Telescope has captured stunning, never-seen-before imagery of a cosmic tarantula located 161,000 light-years away.
The breathtaking photography caught 30 Doradus, nicknamed Tarantula Nebula because of its dusty filament, in staggering detail, including a cluster of young stars shining pale blue.
Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, the Tarantula Nebula is a giant star formation where new stars are born in huge numbers.
It spans across roughly 1,000 light-years, making it the biggest and brightest star-forming region in our local group of galaxies, meaning it's a firm favourite among star gazers and astronomers studying the formation of stars.
On 11 August, NASA took to Instagram to share a never-seen-before photo of the extraordinary cosmic tarantula which perfectly shows where it earned its title.
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"Don't get caught in the Tarantula Nebula. See the thin filaments of gas and dust that snake through this image like a web? That's where the Tarantula Nebula gets its name," the agency wrote in the caption.
"Located about 160,000 light-years from Earth, in the Large Magellanic Cloud (a small galaxy orbiting our own Milky Way), the Tarantula Nebula is the largest and brightest star-forming region in our area. It's home to the biggest stars we've ever discovered, some 200 times more massive than the Sun."
The Hubble Space Telescope has spent a lot of time studying the the Tarantula Nebula, 'not just for its stunning sights, but for what it can tell us about how stars are born'.
Back in 2022, NASA released breathtaking images of the same star formation from the James Webb Telescope, which led to a revelation for astronomers regarding the age of certain stars.
In the centre of the image is a cavity, caused by a group of very large, young stars which are blasting intense light and strong winds of particles.
The only parts of the nebula that can survive this blasting are the densest clumps of gas and dust. Those tough clumps are getting slowly sculpted into long pillar shapes that seem to point toward the star cluster.
Within the pillars are baby stars, called protostars, which remain wrapped in thick cloud of dust that they will eventually break free from, before shaping the nebula themselves.
One very young star was caught doing exactly this by Webb's Near-Infrared Spectrograph, proving astronomers who believed the star to be slightly older wrong.
Emma Rosemurgey