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12th of June 2018
ATCA observations of Westerlund 1
by Andrews et al.
Westerlund 1 is a massive star cluster located about 3.7 kpc, or 12,000 light years, from Earth, that was discovered by Swedish astronomer Bengt Westerlund in 1961. Westerlund 1 is the most massive starburst cluster in the Milky Way and with an age of ∼5 Myr it contains an rich population of very massive stars, with over 200 stars having masses greater than 30 solar masses. Andrews et al. have reported new 5.5 GHz radio observations with the Australia Telescope Compact Array in a 6km array, detecting nine of the ten yellow hypergiants (YHGs) and red supergiants (RSGs) within the cluster.

Shown above is an image of the yellow hyper-giant Wd1-4a and its associated extended emission. The colourscale shows the hypergiant from the ATCA observations, with the overlaid contours from 100 GHz ALMA observations. More details are given in the paper, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.




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