NASA’s Chandra X-ray telescope captures closest tremendous star cluster to Earth (picture)

It is a fowl… it is a airplane… it is a tremendous star cluster! NASA’s Chandra X-ray telescope has imaged a star cluster that’s “tremendous” in each manner. Westerlund 1 is super-large, super-massive, super-young, super-close — and it’s creating stars at a super-fast price.

Westerlund 1 is situated round 13,000 light-years away from Earth — that means it is very shut, comparatively talking — and the three million to five million-year-old star cluster is round 7 light-years huge. If that age would not appear notably younger to you, keep in mind that our middle-aged solar system is about 4.6 billion years previous. Westerlund 1 additionally has a mass equal to as many as 100,000 suns, and it is without doubt one of the few remaining tremendous star clusters within the Milky Way. 

Down the road, finding out Westerlund 1 might assist astronomers higher perceive the inner workings of those cosmic star factories. The picture is a part of the primary knowledge launched from the Prolonged Westerlund 1 and a pair of Open Clusters Survey (EWOCS), led by astronomers from the Italian Nationwide Institute of Astrophysics in Palermo. As a part of the EWOCS program, Chandra watched Westerlund 1 for a complete of round 12 days.

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In its present epoch, the Milky Way produces very few stars, with only a handful of stellar our bodies generated every year. Nonetheless, our galaxy wasn’t at all times so quiet. It as soon as produced vastly extra stars; at its peak round 10 billion years in the past, it birthed between dozens and lots of of stars yearly.

Astronomers imagine this intense star formation was primarily localized in tremendous star clusters like Westerlund 1. These are younger star clusters with plenty not less than 10,000 occasions that of the solar.

The X-rays from Westerlund 1, seen by Chandra and visual within the picture as pinks and whites, are from younger stars. In the meantime, blobs of pink, inexperienced and blue characterize diffuse heated fuel all through the supercluster.

The brand new Chandra knowledge has tripled the variety of recognized X-ray sources in Westerlund 1. Previous to the EWOCS challenge, Chandra had detected 1,721 X-ray sources within the famous person cluster; the EWOCS knowledge, however, has revealed nearly 6,000 X-ray sources. These embody faint stars with masses lower than that of the sun.

This offers astronomers a brand new inhabitants of stars in Westerlund 1 to check. Which means, not solely does the proximity of Westerlund 1 make it a superb goal for investigating star formation as a complete and decoding how such star-cluster environments influence planet birth, however the tremendous star cluster can be helpful for analyzing how stars with completely different plenty evolve.

Chandra additionally discovered that 1,075 of the celebrities it detected are crammed right into a 4-light-year-wide area on the coronary heart of Westerlund 1. To image simply how dense this area is with stars, think about that there are 4.24 gentle years between the solar and its closest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri.

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The extra diffuse blob of pink that dominates the Chandra picture of Westerlund 1 represents a halo of hot gas on the heart of the tremendous star cluster. Not solely might this facet of this area assist ship a extra exact mass estimate of Westerlund 1, nevertheless it might additionally assist assess how this specific assortment of stars got here to be and the way it has modified over time.

The EWOCS outcomes are mentioned in a paper printed in February within the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.