In the past, map makers often placed monsters on their maps to mark unexplored regions and potentially dangerous regions. A famous example is the 'Theatrum Orbis Terrarum' map, created in 1570, which features sea serpents and other sea monsters.
Fast forward to today , and an unexplored Milky Way star cluster suggests that astronomers should adopt this tradition, too. The cluster is known as Barbá 2 and is found just 24,000 light-years or so away from Earth. An investigation using the star-surveying Gaia space telescope revealed that the Barbá 2 is packed with red supergiant stars, stars that can be hundreds of times wider than the sun and up to 1,000,000 times as luminous as the sun.
