Get big, die young. Such is the fate of behemoth stars, the largest of which are about 150 times the mass of the sun. A new study, however, finds evidence for stars more than twice that size, including an uber-giant so luminous that it makes the light of our sun look no brighter than the glow of the full moon in comparison.
Isolating the light of the biggest stars is a difficult and tedious process. Massive stars are rare, distant, short-lived and crammed inside dense clusters that are shrouded in dust. In the past, reports of stars up to 2,000 times the size of the sun all turned out to be clusters of stars, not single, massive objects.
"People have been trying to find the most massive star and to determine the upper mass limit of stars, but it's like prospecting for gold. You have to sift through a whole lot of junk and there's also a lot of fool's gold," said Rochester Institute of Technology astronomer Donald Figer.
Armed with new high-resolution imagery, an international team of astronomers is throwing down the gauntlet again with studies on NGC 3603, a very young star cluster located about 22,000 light-years away in the Milky Way's Carina spiral arm, and RMC 136a, which resides in the Tarantula Nebula, located 165,000 light-years away in our neighbor galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud.
Read more at Discovery News
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