
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.