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

Abstract Observations of massive star-forming regions show that classical stellar wind models overpredict the luminosity of the X-ray-emitting gas, indicating a significant fraction of wind energy is lost. In this paper, we present a multiwavelength analysis of the giant H ii region 30 Doradus and its central star cluster R136 using 2 Ms of Chandra data, combined with James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope imaging and Spitzer spectral energy distributions, to investigate how the energy of the hot gas 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 α and X-ray surface brightness profiles show that the X-rays peak interior to the H α shells, demonstrating partial confinement of the hot gas. The fragmented shell structure and the bright X-ray interior that declines near the H α 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 α 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 because mass-loading of the hot bubble could reproduce the X-ray observables.