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Space
Space
Science
Robert Lea

Gaia space telescope discovers 55 'runaway' careening away from stellar cluster at 80 times the speed of sound

Red and yellow smohe against a black background with blue spheres emerging from its central region.

Using Europe's Gaia space telescope, astronomers have identified 55 runaway stars being ejected at high speeds from a densely packed young cluster in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way. This is the first time so many stars have been seen escaping from a single star cluster.

The star cluster R136, located around 158,000 light-years away, is home to hundreds of thousands of stars and sits in a massive region of intense star formation in the LMC. It's home to some of the biggest stars ever seen by astronomers, some with 300 times the mass of the sun.

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