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Three new types of object have been discovered in our galaxy: huge gamma-ray clouds, dense X-ray engines almost hidden in cocoons of dust, and bubbles blown by the wind from giant stars.
All three discoveries were reported on Monday at a conference at Stanford University in California, US.
Two come courtesy of the High Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS), an array of four telescopes in Namibia that detects photons of extremely high energy. When one of these gamma rays hits the atmosphere, it produces a flash of blue light that HESS can pick up.
HESS has seen such gamma rays coming from Westerlund 2, a cluster of massive, bright stars about 25,000 light years away. The emission is too diffuse to be coming directly from the stars. "The gamma-ray source is much larger than the cluster itself," says team member Olaf Reimer of Stanford.
Instead, he thinks the emission is generated by winds from several massive stars within the cluster. Called Wolf-Rayet stars, they are so bright their light blasts gas off of them and out into space. The total energy in this stellar wind over the course of each star's brief life is similar to that of a supernova explosion.

Particle accelerator

"The solar wind [from our Sun] is a gentle breeze compared with these things," says Luke Drury, a theoretician from the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in Ireland.
As the winds slam into interstellar gas around the cluster, they create Continue Reading

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