It's a bird... it's a plane... it's a super star cluster! NASA's Chandra X-ray telescope has imaged a star cluster that is "super" in every way. Westerlund 1 is super-large, super-massive, super-young, super-close — and it is creating stars at a super-fast rate.
Westerlund 1 is located around 13,000 light-years away from Earth — meaning it's very close, relatively speaking — and the 3 million to 5 million-year-old star cluster is around 7 light-years wide. If that age doesn't seem particularly young to you, remember that our middle-aged solar system is about 4.6 billion years old. Westerlund 1 also has a mass equivalent to as many as 100,000 suns, and it is one of the few remaining super star clusters in the Milky Way.
