Lead author Fabian Schneider, a Hintze Research Fellow in the University of Oxford's Department of Physics, said: 'We were astonished when we realised that
30 Doradus has formed many more massive stars than expected.'
30 Doradus 016 is a refugee from the
30 Doradus star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.
The massive binary star R144 can be found in an outer area of the star-forming region
30 Doradus in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
This scale can be compared to the physical diameter of a well-known HII region in our Galaxy, that is, the Orion nebula (D ~ 8 pc), or to the extent of what is considered prototypes of extragalactic giant HII regions, such as
30 Doradus (D ~ 200 pc) or NGC 604 (D ~ 460 pc).
What at first was thought to be only one cluster in the core of the massive star-forming region
30 Doradus (also known as the Tarantula Nebula) has been found to be a composite of two clusters that differ in age by about one million years.
"We now know that in many star-forming regions, such as
30 Doradus, you find such pillars," Livio adds.
Observations show that when they were bursting into life, the majority of these galaxies were small, just a few hundred light-years across--comparable to the size of individual star-forming regions in the Milky Way and its companions, such as
30 Doradus (Tarantula Nebula; S&T: Nov.
Also, there is an unusually large number of high-velocity stars around
30 Doradus. Astronomers believe that these stars, often called "runaway stars" were expelled from the core of
30 Doradus as the result of dynamical interactions.
It was a brilliant burst of light near the object
30 Doradus in the Large Magellanic Cloud last February that first called attention to the explosion of the nearest supernova in almost 400 years.