Taming the Tarantula: How Stellar Wind Feedback Shapes Gas and Dust in 30 Doradus

TL;DR

This study investigates how stellar wind feedback influences gas and dust in 30 Doradus, revealing that hot gas energy is lost through turbulent mixing, cooling, and leakage, with observations compared to simulations to understand feedback processes.

Contribution

It provides a multi-wavelength analysis of 30 Doradus, highlighting the role of turbulent mixing and thermal conduction in hot gas energy loss, and compares observations with recent stellar feedback simulations.

Findings

Hot gas and dust are not directly coupled.

X-ray emission peaks inside Hα shells, indicating partial confinement.

Simulations match morphology but differ in X-ray brightness and spectrum.

Abstract

Observations of massive star-forming regions show that classical stellar wind models over-predict the luminosity of the X-ray emitting gas, indicating a significant fraction of wind energy is lost. In this paper, we present a multi-wavelength analysis of the giant HII region 30 Doradus and its central star cluster R136 using 2 Ms of Chandra X-ray Observatory data, combined with James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope imaging and Spitzer spectral-energy distributions, to investigate how the hot gas energy is lost through turbulent mixing, radiative cooling, and physical leakage. We compare the spatial and spectral properties of the hot gas with those of the warm ionized gas and dust. We find no significant correlation between the dust and hot gas temperatures, suggesting they are not directly coupled and that the dust resides in the swept-up shells where it is heated radiatively. H$\alpha$ and X-ray surface brightness profiles show that the X-rays peak interior to the H$\alpha$ shells, demonstrating partial confinement of the hot gas. The fragmented shell structure and bright X-ray interior that declines near the H$\alpha$ shell reflect efficient cooling from turbulent mixing at the hot-cold interface. We compare against recent simulations of stellar-feedback driven bubbles which have broad agreement with the morphology of the X-ray and H$\alpha$ emission, but the simulations produce a dip in the interior X-ray surface brightness and a lack of hard X-rays compared to the observations. These differences may suggest thermal conduction is important as mass-loading of the hot bubble could reproduce the X-ray observables.