Chandra Release - August 31, 2005 Visual Description: Trumpler 14 The X-ray image of the star cluster Trumpler 14 depicts a bright cluster of stars like a collection of bright pink and purple jewels sparkling on a background of hot pink and blue gas. There are two rectangular shapes to the image, and the gap between the upper and lower portions of the overall image is an instrumental artifact. Chandra's image of the star cluster Trumpler 14 shows about 1,600 stars and a diffuse glow from hot multimillion degree X-ray producing gas. The cluster has one of the highest concentrations of massive, luminous stars in the Galaxy. Located on the edge of a giant molecular cloud, it is part of the Carina Complex which contains at least 8 star clusters. The bright stars in Trumpler 14 are young (about 1 million years old), and much more massive than the Sun. They will shine brightly, exhaust their prodigious energy, and explode spectacularly as supernovas in a few million years. The glow in the lower, rectangular part of the image is from a gas cloud that has been enriched with oxygen, neon, silicon and iron. This probably marks the final contribution of a once-bright star that exploded as a supernova thousands of years ago, and in the process dispersed these heavy elements into the interstellar medium.