This is the first publicly available data from the project called the Extended Westerlund 1 and 2 Open Clusters Survey (EWOCS). EWOCS The project is led by astronomers at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics in Palermo. As part of EWOCS, Chandra observed Westerlund 1 for a total of about 12 days.
Currently, only a few stars form in the Galaxy each year. But the Milky Way once formed tens to hundreds of stars per year, peaking about 10 billion years ago. Most of this occurred in massive star clusters called “superclusters,” like Westerlund 1. These clusters are young and have more than 10,000 times the mass of the Sun. Westerlund 1 is between 3 and 5 million years old.
The new images include deep space data from Chandra and earlier data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. space Telescope. Chandra’s X-rays reveal the young stars and diffuse heated gas in the cluster. The young stars appear mostly in white and pink, while the heated gas appears in pink, green, and blue (increasing temperature). Hubble data highlights many of the stars as yellow and blue dots.
Very few superclusters exist in the Galaxy today. They give us valuable insight into the era when most of the stars in our Galaxy formed. Westerlund 1 is the largest remaining. Super Cluster It is a star in the Milky Way galaxy. It has a mass between 50,000 and 100,000 times that of the Sun and is the closest star to Earth, located about 13,000 light-years away.
These properties make Westerlund 1 an ideal target for studying the effects of supercluster environments on star and planet formation. Researchers will also be able to study the evolution of stars across a range of masses.
New Chandra data from Westerlund 1 significantly increases the number of known X-ray sources in the cluster. Previously, Chandra had detected 1,721 sources in Westerlund 1. The EWOCS data revealed about 6,000 X-ray sources, including many faint stars less massive than the Sun, giving astronomers a new population of stars to study.
One notable finding is that 1,075 stars are packed tightly within a four light-year radius of Westerlund 1’s core. To put this in perspective, four light years is the distance between our sun and our nearest neighbor.
Diffuse emission in the EWOCS data has detected for the first time a halo of hot gas around the centre of Westerlund 1, which astronomers believe is crucial for understanding the formation and evolution of the cluster and for more precisely estimating its mass.