NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has obtained a stunning image of a star cluster called Trumpler 14, one of the largest gatherings of hot, massive and bright stars in our Milky Way Galaxy.
This composite image of the star cluster Trumpler 14 was made with data taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Jesús Maíz Apellániz, Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia.
Trumpler 14, also known as C 1041-593 and Cl VDBH 102, is a young open cluster in the constellation Carina.
It is only 6 light-years across and is located 9,100 light-years away in the inner regions of the well-known Carina Nebula, a huge star-formation region in our Galaxy.
Noted for harboring Eta Carinae, one of the most massive stars in the Galaxy, this nebula also houses several clusters of young stars.
At a mere 500,000 years old, Trumpler 14 is the youngest of these star gatherings.
According to astronomers, it is also one of the most populous star clusters within the nebula: around 2,000 stars reside within Trumpler 14, ranging in size from less than one tenth to up to several tens of times the mass of the Sun.
The most prominent star in the cluster, and the brightest star in this Hubble image, is the O-type star HD 93129Aa.
This supergiant star is approximately 2.5 million times brighter than the Sun, and has a mass 80 times greater. It forms a close binary with another massive star, HD 93129Ab, meaning that the two orbit around a shared center of mass.
With a surface temperature of over 50,000 degrees Kelvin, HD 93129Aa is one of the hottest O-type stars in the entire Milky Way.
O-type stars are rapidly working their way through their vast supplies of hydrogen, and have only a few million years of life left before they meet a dramatic demise and explode as supernovae. In the meantime, despite their youth, these stars are making a huge impact on their environment.
As the stars fling out high-speed particles from their surfaces, strong winds surge out into space. These winds collide with the surrounding material, causing shock waves that heat the gas to millions of degrees and trigger intense bursts of X-rays. These strong stellar winds also carve out cavities in nearby clouds of gas and dust, and kickstart the formation of new stars.
The peculiar arc-shaped cloud visible at the very bottom of this image is suspected to be the result of such a wind.
The image is a composite of separate exposures acquired by Hubble’s ACS/WFC instrument. Several filters were used to sample various wavelengths. The color results from assigning different hues to each monochromatic image associated with an individual filter.
