The 30 Doradus Nebula (also known as the Tarantula Nebula, or NGC 2070) is about 180,000 light years from Earth. The Hubble Space Telescope has taken a picture of this nebula, and in particular, looked at a star that has 90 times the mass of our Sun, and is traveling at 400,000 kilometers an hour. At that speed, it has traveled about 375 light years from its original home.
A heavy runaway star rushing away from a nearby stellar nursery at more than 400 000 kilometres per hour, a speed that would get you to the Moon and back in two hours. The runaway is the most extreme case of a very massive star that has been kicked out of its home by a group of even heftier siblings. Tantalising clues from three observatories, including the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s newly installed Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS), and some old-fashioned detective work, suggest that the star may have travelled about 375 light-years from its suspected home, a giant star cluster called R136.
