 Here we'll take a look at some of the amazing nebula in the LMC. This stellar region is called Thuriduratus. It contains millions of young stars, including the most massive stars ever seen, way more than a hundred times the mass of our sun. No known star-forming region in our galaxy is as large or as prolific as Thuriduratus. With this closer look, we see the tarantula nebula. Early astronomers nicknamed the nebula because its glowing filaments resembled spider legs. The image reveals the stages of star birth from embryonic stars a few thousand years old wrapped in their eggs to behemoths that die young in supernova explosions. Astronomers using unique ultraviolet capabilities of the Hubble Space Telescope have identified nine monster stars with masses over 100 times the mass of the sun in the star cluster R136. This makes it the largest sample of very massive stars identified to date. The detected stars are not only extremely massive, but also extremely bright. Together, these nine stars outshine the sun by a factor of 30 million. Hodge 301, seen in the lower right hand corner of this image, lies inside the tarantula nebula. Many of the stars in Hodge 301 are so old that they have exploded as supernova. These exploded stars are blasting material into the surrounding region at speeds of almost 320 kilometers per second. That's 200 miles per second. The high speed matter is plowing into the surrounding tarantula nebula, shocking and compressing the gas into a multitude of sheets and filaments seen in the upper left portion of the picture.