Zoom on the Lynx arc

The Lynx arc is 1 million times brighter than the well-known Orion Nebula, a nearby prototypical star-birth region visible with small telescopes. The newly identified megastar-birth cluster contains a million blue-white stars that are twice as hot as similar stars in our Milky Way galaxy. The megastar cluster was detected by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, as a gravitationally magnified smear in light embedded in an image of a relatively nearby galaxy cluster.

Credit: ESA/Hubble (M. Kornmesser & L. L. Christensen)