The only words to describe the splendour of this corner of the Large Magellanic Cloud are those of Howard Carter, the man who discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922. He had chiselled a tiny breach in the mud-plastered doorway (using a chisel that his grandmother had given him for his seventeenth birthday) and by the light of a candle he peered in. Lord Carnarvon, the financial backer of the search for the tomb, asked, “Can you see anything?” All Carter could muster at the sight was, “Yes, wonderful things!”

I feel like Carter peering into the boy Pharaoh’s treasure-filled tomb every time I peer into the 30 Doradus region for it, too, is full of wonderful things… the Tarantula Nebula’s vast N157A’s sculpted landscape of gas and dust where thousands of stars are being born, and with its sparkling stellar centrepiece: R136, the most spectacular cluster of massive stars in our cosmic neighbourhood…. supernova remnant N157B’s glowing patch of silky nebulosity embedded with NGC 2060’s glittering diamond-chip stars… and N157C, the gorgeous superbubble 30 Doradus C, full of compact clusters and Wolf-Rayet stars. The blue supergiant star Sanduleak -69° 202 called this region home… until it blew up and gave us SN1987A, the closest supernova observed since the invention of the telescope.

The Tarantula Nebula was discovered by Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille during his expedition to the Cape of Good Hope between 1751 and 1753, using a half-inch refractor at 8x. He included it in his 1755 catalogue as Class I No. 2 and described it as “like the former [NGC 104: “like the nucleus of a fairly bright comet”] but faint”. Its name 30 Doradus was introduced by Johann Bode when he included it in his 1801 Uranographia star atlas and listed it in the accompanying Allgemeine Beschreibung und “Nachweisung der Gestirne catalogue as number 30 in the constellation “Xiphias or Dorado”. Rather than being given a stellar magnitude, it was noted to be nebulous. It was designated N157A by Karl Henize in 1956 when he published the results of his extensive survey of both Magellanic Clouds for emission line objects, stars and nebulae. And it earned its nickname, the Tarantula Nebula, in the mid-20th century from its spider-like appearance.

I confess that I don’t see the spider; at medium magnification it looks to me like a gloriously overblown rose, the colour of moonlight, that has seen better days and whose petals are beginning to fall to pieces. Image credit ESO/Hubble

The famous Rosetta Stone was found by accident in Egypt in 1799 by soldiers in Napoleon’s army. They discovered the large black rock while digging the foundations of an addition to a fort near the Egyptian town of Rosetta (now Rashid) in the Nile Delta. It had been built into a very old wall. Fortuitously for history, the officer in charge, Pierre-François Bouchard (1771–1822), realised the importance of the discovery.

Archeology’s Rosetta Stone unlocked the secrets of the Ancient Egyptians. Credit: British Museum

Inscribed on its flat face were three versions of a single decree from 196 BC passed by a council of priests, summarising benefactions conferred by the 13-year-old Pharoah, Ptolemy V (205–180 BC), and written in the ninth year of his reign in commemoration of his accession to the throne. The decree was written in three languages – one in hieroglyphs, one in demotic script (a cursive form of hieroglyphics) and one in ancient Greek. The Rosetta Stone provided the key for understanding ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics (which no-one had been able to read since it died out towards the end of 400 AD) and ultimately the great ancient Egyptian civilization that created them.

Some 50 years before the French army found the Rosetta Stone, another Frenchman had made an equally momentous discovery that turned out to be astronomy’s Rosetta Stone… Lacaille’s discovery of 30 Doradus.

Astronomy’s Rosetta Stone is unlocking the secrets of the early universe. Credit: NASA, ESA, F. Paresce (INAF-IASF, Bologna, Italy), R. O’Connell (University of Virginia, Charlottesville), and the Wide Field Camera 3 Science Oversight Committee

The Tarantula is churning out stars at a furious pace and the massive stellar content of the young hot cluster NGC 2070 at whose heart lies the incredible cluster R136, produces an ionizing output that is a thousand-fold higher than our own Orion Nebula. Astronomer Paul Crowther put it best when he said, “With respect to the Orion Nebula, it [the Tarantula Nebula] is 100 times bigger, 100 times more distant and 1000 times brighter.” It wasn’t until the twentieth century that astronomers realised that because the Tarantula Nebula’s furious starburst activity was more common in the earlier stages of the universe and its environment resembles the extreme conditions of the early universe in terms of dust content, metallicity and rate of star formation, Lacaille’s discovery is the “Rosetta Stone” for extragalactic supergiant H II regions. Its proximity and accessibility to X-ray through radio observations allow astronomers to consider both its integrated characteristics and the individual properties of individual massive stars.