Astronomers say colossal star known as R136a1 is more than 265 times more massive than the sun
Astronomers say they have discovered the most colossal star on record, in a region of space known as the Tarantula nebula in a neighbouring galaxy to our own.
The record-breaking star has a mass 265 times greater than the sun and is millions of times brighter, they said.
The discovery has astonished scientists, who thought it was impossible for stars to exceed more than 150 times the mass of the sun.
When the star was born it could have been more than twice as massive. Because it is so far away – about 165,000 light-years – it can only be seen with the use of powerful telescopes in the southern hemisphere.
If the star, known as R136a1, took the place of the sun in our solar system, its gravitational attraction would pull our planet in so close that the length of an "Earth year" would shrink to three weeks.
"It would bathe the Earth with incredibly intense ultraviolet radiation, rendering life on our planet impossible," said Raphael Hirschi, a researcher at Keele University.
A team led by Paul Crowther, an astrophysicist at Sheffield University, used the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in the Atacama desert of northern Chile and archival material from the Hubble space telescope to study two young clusters of stars called NGC 3603 and RMC 136a.
The first group of stars, NGC 3603, lies about 22,000 light-years away, while stars in the RMC136a cluster are in a neighbouring galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud.
The Guardian
