to Rubio et al. (1998; their Figure 3). The literature evidence for dense molecular gas and YSOs in the stapler nebula lying near R136 indicates that star formation may be ongoing, which deserves further study. In this paper we discuss the properties of molecular clouds in the stapler nebula, and examine whether new stars are being formed in these clouds.

This paper is organised as follows. In Section 2 we describe the data used in this study. The results from the analysis of CO(2-1) line observations are presented in Section 3. We discuss the results obtained from nIR emission line images of the stapler nebula in Section 4. Based on archival infrared photometry, we identify YSOs within the stapler nebula in Section 5. The picture obtained from our results is described in Section 6. In Section 7, a brief summary of our paper is presented along with future work arising from our results.

![image](30dorfigcocloseupcssd.jpg){width="49.50000%"} ![image](30dorcocube.pdf){width="49.50000%"} ![image](30dorfigcoh2.pdf){width="49.50000%"} ![image](30dorfigcobrg1.pdf){width="49.50000%"}

\[fig:COa\]

Data
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[CO(2-1)]{} observations
------------------------

We conducted a deep CO(2-1) survey centred on the 30 Doradus Nebula using the Swedish-ESO submillimeter telescope (SEST) across March 1997- January 2001. SEST was a 15m radio telescope located at La Silla, Chile. The angular resolution 