The space telescope James Webb continues to capture images of space that are the sharpest and most detailed we’ve seen before. One of the last images he took is of a “superstar cluster” called Westerlund 1, and it shows a rich collection of celestial bodies, shining brightly like precious stones.
Superstar clusters are dense clusters of mostly very young stars, each with a mass thousands of times greater than its mass. Sun. THE Galaxy it produced us more clusters billions of years ago, but now, being an… old galaxy, it has very little star production and only a few superstar clusters still exist in it.
Westerlund 1 is the largest remaining superstar cluster in our galaxy and also the closest to our planet. It is located 12,000 light-years from Earth and consists of massive stars with masses between 50,000 and 100,000 times the mass of the Sun in a region six light-years across.
These stars include yellow supergiants that are about a million times brighter than our Sun. Because the stars that inhabit the cluster are relatively short-lived, scientists believe they are about 3.5 to 5 million years old. They are in their infancy. As such, it is a valuable source of data that can help us better understand how massive stars form and eventually die. We won’t be around to see it, but the cluster is expected to produce 1,500 supernovae in less than 40 million years.
Astronomers captured an image of the superstar cluster as part of an ongoing survey of Westerlund 1 and another cluster called Westerlund 2 to study star formation and evolution. To capture the image, they used Webb’s near-infrared camera (NIRCam), which was also recently used to capture a gravitationally lensed supernova that could help shed light on how quickly the Universe is expanding.
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