Astronomers surely have a big catch on their hands. Astronomers at the University of Sheffield used Very Large Telescope (VLT) and archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope to study two young clusters of stars, NGC 3603 and RMC 136a and came up with this revelation.
The royal astronomical society reports that the largest star that could possibly exist has been found out. Its size is estimated to be twice the size that the scientists thought can exist. As per the estimates of the researchers it was believed that only a star weighing 150 times of the sun or 150 solar masses can exist. This newly discovered star however has about 300 times as much mass as the sun. The scientists say it might have weighed 320 solar masses initially. The very heavy stars compress under their own gravitational weight and loose mass as they age. The star is supposed to be burning itself at a rate which is 10 million times the rate at which sun burns itself. These super-heavyweight stars are extremely rare, forming only within the densest star clusters.
The scientists also found several other stars with a surface temperature above 40,000 degrees which is more than seven times the surface temperature of sun. R136a1 is the most massive object that has ever been found by the humans. Not only is R136a1 the most massive star ever found, but it also has the highest luminosity too – close to 10 million times greater than the sun.
This star is located in the Tarantula Nebula which is 22,000 light years from the sun. Tarantula Nebula is sprawling cloud of gas and dust in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy which is 165,000 light-years away from the Milky Way galaxy.
The researchers previously believed that a star of mass more than 150 solar units cannot exist as with the increasing size of a star the amount of energy generated at its core grows faster than the gravitational force that holds them together which would result in instability of the star. As per the discovery within the cluster, the R136 four out of the total 100,000 stars weighed more than 150 solar units.