23rd July 2010
There is a monster lurking out there, a star that has blown away the upper limits for what was ever thought possible for a sun in the universe. Blazing with an brightness that is literally unimaginable to the human mind, ten million times that of our Sun. You know how you can’t look directly at the Sun for more than a split second or so, and even this can be dangerous…now imagine something ten million times brighter than that. You’d probably have trouble imagining something just ten times brighter!
But this star has not just blown the limits for brightness, this heavyweight is 265 times more massive than our Sun, at least. Now here is where there might be a little confusion, and I admit it’s an easy mistake to make. Massive does not necessarily equal big, a box of lead is more massive than a box of feathers of the same size. There is more mass packed into the lead, so it’s more massive than the box of feathers and far heavier. The star R135a1 is at least 265 times more massive than the Sun. Now don’t get me wrong, it sure is a biggy, it’s around 30 times the radius of our star but it’s extremely massive. By comparison the swollen red supergiant star Betelgeuse is up to 1000 times larger than our Sun, but just 20 times more massive…in fact it has a density of less than air. So remember that the big thing here is mass, (no pun intended).
This behemoth star R136a1 has been discovered by scientists at the University of Sheffield as they mulled over new data from ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, and previous observations by the Hubble Space Telescope. This star is in our own backyard in cosmic terms, just down the road at 22,000 light years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud. This is actually a small satellite galaxy that orbits around our own Milky Way and was captured by our Galaxy’s gravity eons ago. The Sheffield group were studying young star clusters in the Large Magellanic Cloud, in a star forming region called the Tarantula Nebula.
This video shows the young star cluster 136a where the mammoth star was discovered
Betelgeuse is a bloated red supergiant star nearing the end of it’s life that has expanded to nearly 1000 times the size of the Sun. The newly discovered star R136a1 is a youngster, so in reality the two are very different. The previous upper limits for a stellar giant like this was thought to be around 150 times the mass of the Sun, but this hefty specimen is tipping the scales at 265 to 300 times the Sun’s mass. This leviathan will burn up it’s fuel at a ferocious rate, and end it’s life quickly. So quickly in fact, that no planets will even have the chance to form in orbit around it.
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