Physics and Astronomy Professor Provides Insights on Birth & Death of Stars
In June 2024, The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series published the article “,” which provided the most extensive dataset and analysis of the most detailed X-ray observations ever gathered on a spectacular stellar nursery. Matthew Povich, professor and chair of Physics and Astronomy, was the coordinating author.
In an unusual twist, the article and a colorful image of the Tarantula Nebula received a publicity push this year from the Chandra X-ray Center, which pitched its composite image of the star forming region as “a bouquet of thousands of stars” in time for Valentine’s Day, despite the region being named for a spider whose mating ritual often includes cannibalism.
Formally known as 30 Doradus, the is located about 160,000 light years away in the , the largest satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. A dense cluster at the center of the nebula contains the most massive stars ever found. Those young stars launch strong winds into space at speeds 1,000 times greater than the fastest supersonic jet airplane. The winds mix with the matter and energy ejected by stars that have previously exploded, creating a superheated soup of shocked plasma permeating the entire nebula.
The article’s dataset comes from a record 23 days of observation time by the Chandra X-ray Observatory, which is famed for its unequaled high-energy X-ray imaging detail. During these observations, Chandra detected 3,615 X-ray sources including a mixture of massive stars, double-star systems, bright stars still in the process of forming, and much smaller clusters of young stars.
“The big scientific takeaway,” said Povich, “is that the X-ray image from the dataset provides so much depth that we can see features in the nebula that we could never see before. We observed new details about the violent birth and sudden death of massive stars in a stellar nursey that contains a million stars. You see star birth and death happening at the same time. You can trace some really extreme phenomena based on 10-million-degree super-heated plasma that comes into direct contact with cold gas. It remains an open question how the presence of such X-ray plasma may affect the birth of new stars and planets in these types of starburst nebulae.
“The stars producing these strong winds typically range from at least 20 times to more than 200 times the mass of our sun. In terms of their power output, their brightness, it’s crazy. Each of those stars are half a million to 2 million times more powerful than our sun.”
The Chandra X-ray Observatory, which launched in 1999 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is the world’s most powerful X-ray telescope and famed for providing unrivaled views of supermassive black holes, exploding massive stars and collisions between galaxy clusters. Over the last two years, its mission has ramped down due to NASA funding cuts.
“We will not get a better X-ray data set on this nebula for at least 20 years,” Povich said. “There is no other telescope that can do this, so this work won’t be surpassed for a generation.”
The paper describing these results is the first in a planned collection publishing posthumously the unfinished work of Leisa K. Townsley (Penn State), who was principal investigator of the T-ReX project. Povich and co-author Patrick Broos (Penn State) completed the manuscript based on her initial draft, notes and private communications.
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory's Chandra X-ray Center controls science operations from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts.