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Over the past three years, astronomers working with the Hubble Space Telescope have studied the formation processes of planets in the nearby, massive and young star cluster Westerlund 2. It turned out that in the center of the cluster, planets do not form because they have nothing to do with. Looking at the stars in the center of the cluster, astronomers have noticed the absence of characteristic dust clouds, from which – in a few million years – new planets could form. According to the researchers, such a state is guilty of truly star monsters, i.e. massive stars weighing up to a hundred times the mass of the Sun, whose intense radiation disperses gas-dust discs surrounding smaller stars in their surroundings. Planet formation processes in young star clusters have already been studied, but only in the nearest low-density star-forming regions. The extension of the scope of research to include the massive and extremely dense Westerlund 2 cluster allowed us to understand why too many ...