25 years of Hubble with IMPRS student Peter Zeidler

The 25th anniversary NASA Hubble Space Telescope image has been processed in collaboration with IMPRS-HD student Peter Zeidler.

Westerlund 2 is one of the most massive young star clusters in the Milky Way. With an age of only two million years and its close proximity to Earth (4.16 kpc), it is a perfect target to study early cluster evolution.

Using deep, high-­resolution Hubble Space Telescope images we can determine the cluster’s properties with unprecedented accuracy.

The main goals of Peter and collaborators are to characterize its dominant pre-­main-­sequence population, to de termine its mass function, and to reveal a possible age spread.