The Tarantula Nebula, also called NGC 2070, Caldwell 103 or 30 Doradus, is a vast H-II region in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). It consists mainly of interstellar gas illuminated by and ionizing a high concentration of massive, young and hot stars - for example:

• R136a1 is the brightest and most massive of all the stable stars we know of (Source: ESO).
• VFTS 243 is a blue main sequence star orbiting an inactive black hole! The black hole has about nine times the mass of the Sun, while VFTS 243 has 25 times the mass of the Sun, making it 200,000 times larger than the black hole (Source: Nature Astronomy).

The total mass of NGC 2070 is about 1,000,000 solar masses and its diameter is almost 1,000 light-years, making it one of the largest regions of ionized gas in the entire local group of galaxies (Source: NASA).

AstroBin