NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope captured a surreal image of open cluster Westerlund 1, which is located approximately 12,000 light-years away in the southern constellation Ara (the Altar). This cluster is home to a large, dense, and diverse population of massive stars, which has no counterpart in other known Milky Way galaxy clusters.
Every star that has been identified in this cluster are evolved and gargantuan, spanning the full range of stellar classifications including Wolf-Rayet stars, OB supergiants, yellow hypergiants (nearly as bright as 1-million Suns) and luminous blue variables. Astronomers estimate the cluster’s age to be somewhere between 3.5 and 5 million years because such stars have a rather short life.
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Westerlund 1 is an impressive example of a super star cluster: it contains hundreds of very massive stars, some shining with a brilliance of almost one million Suns and others two thousand times larger than the Sun (as large as the orbit of Saturn). Indeed, if the Solar System was located at the heart of this remarkable cluster, our sky would be full of hundreds of stars as bright as the full Moon,” said the ESA.
