Astronomers have brought you a space Valentine: The Tarantula of the cosmos

天文学家给你带来了太空情人：宇宙狼蛛

The petals of a cosmic Valentine's Day flower are unfurled in this image taken by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, revealing the most detailed X-ray image ever of the great star-forming nebula 30 Doradus in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

这张由美国宇航局钱德拉x射线天文台拍摄的宇宙情人节花的花瓣展开的照片，揭示了大麦哲伦星云中的大恒星形成星云剑鱼座30的有史以来最详细的x射线图像。

The four blue petals depict hot gas that's been energized by winds of radiation coming from nascent hot, young stars — as well as by these stars' eventual death cries rooted in the supernova explosions that mark the ends of their lives a few million years later.

这四个蓝色的花瓣描绘了炽热的气体，这些气体是由新生的炽热的年轻恒星发出的辐射风所激发的，也描绘了这些恒星最终的死亡之声，这些死亡之声源于超新星爆炸，标志着数百万年后它们生命的终结。

Though 30 Doradus is ostensibly a star-forming region, it captures the entire life cycle of the most massive stars that live relatively short lives. In a way, these stars' cradles are also their graves. To emphasize the point, the most recent supernova to be visible to the naked eye, SN 1987A, exploded on the outskirts of 30 Doradus. And from the ashes of this and other dead stars, the beautiful cosmic flower has grown.

虽然剑鱼座30表面上是一个恒星形成区域，但它捕捉了寿命相对较短的最大质量恒星的整个生命周期。在某种程度上，这些明星的摇篮也是他们的坟墓。为了强调这一点，最近肉眼可见的超新星SN 1987A在剑鱼座30号的外围爆炸。从这颗和其他死亡恒星的灰烬中，美丽的宇宙之花已经生长出来。

The X-ray emission from Chandra is presented here in blue and green. That's false color, of course — a representation of X-rays that we cannot otherwise see with our eyes. It's also the deepest-ever X-ray observation of 30 Doradus — Chandra's previous effort amounted to about 1.3 days' worth of exposures, whereas this new image accounts for 23 days of observations. Among the diffuse gas are 3,615 discrete X-ray sources, ranging from supernova remnants, compact binaries featuring neutron stars or stellar-mass black holes, X-ray pulsars, infant T Tauri stars and massive stars in binary systems. In fact, the exposure time was so long that Chandra could see some of these X-ray sources changing over time, brought about by phenomena such as the orbital mechanics of binary systems.

钱德拉的x射线辐射是蓝色和绿色的。当然，这是一种假颜色——一种我们用眼睛无法看到的x射线的表示。这也是迄今为止对剑鱼座30号进行的最深入的x射线观测——钱德拉之前的努力总共进行了大约1.3天的曝光，而这张新图像的观测时间为23天。在弥散气体中有3615个离散的x射线源，包括超新星遗迹、以中子星或恒星质量黑洞为特征的致密双星、x射线脉冲星、金牛座婴儿T星和双星系统中的大质量恒星。事实上，曝光时间很长，钱德拉可以看到一些x射线源随着时间的推移而变化，这是由双星系统的轨道力学等现象引起的。

Thrown in for good measure is radio data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile that shows tendrils of dust depicted here in orange (again, false color) and Hubble Space Telescope optical data in yellow. Hubble has imaged 30 Doradus many times during its 35 years in space; the region is also known as the Tarantula Nebula because of its arachnid-like appearance in visible light.

另外还有来自智利阿塔卡马大型毫米波/亚毫米波阵列（ALMA）的射电数据，图中显示的尘埃卷须为橙色（还是假色），哈勃太空望远镜的光学数据为黄色。哈勃望远镜在35年的太空生涯中多次拍摄到剑鱼座30；这个区域也被称为狼蛛星云，因为它在可见光下看起来像蜘蛛。

The Tarantula spins its web in the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way, 160,000 light-years from us. The nebula is huge, spanning 650 light-years in diameter. It's one of the most intense star-forming regions around, and in fact the largest in the Local Group of galaxies, which include the Andromeda and Triangulum spiral galaxies. It has been able to grow so huge because, unlike those spiral galaxies, where the differential rotation of the galactic disk creates sheer forces that rip gas clouds apart if they reach a certain size, the Large Magellanic Cloud doesn't have the same kind of differential rotation where some parts rotate faster than others.And fittingly for the largest star-forming region, it produces the most massive stars too.

狼蛛在大麦哲伦星云中织网，大麦哲伦星云是银河系的卫星星系，距离我们16万光年。这个星云非常巨大，直径达650光年。它是最密集的恒星形成区域之一，实际上是本星系群中最大的一个，本星系群包括仙女座和三角座螺旋星系。大麦哲伦星云之所以能够长得如此巨大，是因为与那些螺旋星系不同，在那些螺旋星系中，星系盘的微分旋转会产生巨大的力量，如果气体云达到一定的大小，就会撕裂它们，而大麦哲伦星云没有同样的微分旋转，有些部分比其他部分旋转得快。对于最大的恒星形成区域来说，它也能产生最大质量的恒星。

Inside 30 Doradus is a giant, young star cluster called NGC 2070, and at the heart of that cluster is a dense concentration of stars — a cluster within a cluster, if you will — called R136. At the core of R136 lies the most massive star known in the universe, called R136a1. It is a Wolf–Rayet star, which is a type of temperamental massive star that is highly unstable and sheds its skin in violent pulsations. Its current mass is about 200 times the mass of our sun, but when it formed just over a million years ago, it had a mass about 325 times greater than our sun, and has expelled the difference in mass over its lifetime.

剑鱼座30内部有一个巨大的年轻星团，名为NGC 2070，在这个星团的中心是一个密集聚集的恒星——一个星团中的星团，如果你愿意的话——被称为R136。R136的核心是宇宙中已知质量最大的恒星，名为R136a1。它是一颗沃尔夫-拉叶星，这是一种喜怒无常的大质量恒星，高度不稳定，并在剧烈的脉动中蜕皮。它目前的质量大约是太阳的200倍，但当它在100多万年前形成时，它的质量大约是太阳的325倍，并且在它的一生中已经消除了质量的差异。

If 30 Doradus is a flower, then the expanding debris of supernova explosions within it carry the flower's pollen. Stars are element factories, fusing increasingly heavy elements in their central nuclear reactors, and producing even more precious metals in the ferocity of their supernova explosions. The debris from these stellar conflagrations is carried far and wide across space, germinating new sites of star and planet formation.

如果剑鱼30号是一朵花，那么它内部超新星爆炸的膨胀碎片携带着花的花粉。恒星是元素工厂，在它们的中心核反应堆中融合越来越重的元素，在它们猛烈的超新星爆炸中产生更多的贵金属。这些恒星燃烧产生的碎片被带到太空中，孕育出恒星和行星形成的新地点。

If you want to learn more about how this image was created, and what science it can teach us, you can read the paper about these results that was published in July 2024 in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series.

如果您想更多地了解这张图像是如何创建的，以及它可以教给我们什么科学，您可以阅读2024年7月发表在《天体物理学杂志增刊》系列中的有关这些结果的论文。