The cluster resides inside a stellar breeding ground known as Gum 29, located 20,000 light-years away in the constellation Carina.

All five Wolf Rayets are extremely young massive objects with OIf*/WN spectral types, amongst the most luminous stars in the galaxy.

This composite spectral type indicates young very massive hydrogen-burning stars that are just starting to convect nitrogen and helium to the surface and develop denser stellar winds so that they show the emission lines of a Wolf-Rayet star.

[6] Westerlund 2 also contains a large number of pre-main sequence stars with masses below 2.5 M☉.

[9] On 23 April 2015 an image of the Westerlund 2 cluster was chosen to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope.