Stars, planets, compact objects and stellar exotica in starburst environment: the EWOCS project.

Star formation in our Galaxy typically occurs in environments counting a few 100, 1000 stars. However, a few more extreme star forming environments exist, where hundreds of thousands to millions of stars form in dense regions, often in single events of star formation. Often called starburst regions, they are rare in our Galaxy today, while they are common in galaxies experiencing epochs of intense star formation and in the early Universe. With a distance of 3.87 kpc from the Sun, and an estimated initial mass of 52000 Msol, Westerlund1 is the closest starburst cluster to the Sun. It offers the unique possibility to study star and planet formation, early stellar evolution and compact objects in a starburst environment. In this talk I will present the EWOCS project (Extended Westerlund One Chandra, and JWST, Survey) which is based on a 1Msec Chandra/ACIS-I Large Project, oncoming JWST observations of Westerlund 1, and other optical/infrared data at high spatial resolution (GEMS/GSAOI, HST, etc.). I will discuss the objectives of the project, present the state of the art of data analysis and some preliminary results.