Megan Watzke
Chandra X-ray Center, Cambridge, Mass.
617-496-7998

For Release: January 23, 2008

Westerlund 2: A Stellar Sight
[http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2008/wd2/]

This Chandra X-ray Observatory image shows Westerlund 2, a young star
cluster with an estimated age of about one or two million years. Until
recently little was known about this cluster because it is heavily obscured
by dust and gas. However, using infrared and X-ray observations to overcome
this obscuration, Westerlund 2 has become regarded as one of the most
interesting star clusters in the Milky Way galaxy. It contains some of the
hottest, brightest and most massive stars known.

This Chandra image of Westerlund 2 shows low energy X-rays in red,
intermediate energy X-rays in green and high energy X-rays in blue. The
image shows a very high density of massive stars that are bright in X-rays,
plus diffuse X-ray emission.

An incredibly massive double star system called WR20a is visible as the
bright yellow point just below and to the right of the cluster's center.
This system contains stars with masses of 82 and 83 times that of the Sun.
The dense streams of matter steadily ejected by these two massive stars,
called stellar winds, collide with each other and produce copious amounts of
X-ray emission. This collision is seen at different angles as the stars
orbit around each other every 3.7 days. Several other bright X-ray sources
may also show evidence for collisions between winds in massive binary
systems.