R136 (formerly known as RMC 136 from the Radcliffe Observatory Magellanic Clouds catalogue[4]) is the central concentration of stars in the NGC 2070 star cluster, which lies at the centre of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

When originally named it was an unresolved stellar object (catalogued as HD 38268 and Wolf-Rayet star Brey 82) but is now known to include 72 class O and Wolf–Rayet stars within 5 parsecs (20 arc seconds) of the centre of the cluster.

[5] The extreme number and concentration of young massive stars in this part of the LMC qualifies it as a starburst region.

A small number of B-type main sequence stars have been detected in the outskirts of the cluster, but less massive and less luminous stars cannot be resolved from the dense cluster core at the large distance of the LMC.

R136a was resolved using speckle interferometry and eventually space-based observations into as many as 24 components,[11] dominated by R136a1, R136a2, and R136a3, all three being extremely massive WNh stars several million times more luminous than the sun.