Astronomers have found one of the heaviest stars ever seen, helping to answer a question that has been a mystery for a century: just how big can stars get?
Astronomers have found one of the heaviest stars ever seen, helping to answer a question that has been a mystery for a century: just how big can stars get? The answer is that nobody knows yet, but it is at least 265 times the mass of the sun and could be larger. Called R136a1, it was found with the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory, located in Chile. The research team, led by Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Sheffield, had the telescope scan certain parts of the sky in the near-infrared. They also used archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope.
The answer is that nobody knows yet, but it is at least 265 times the mass of the sun and could be larger. Called R136a1, it was found with the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory, located in Chile.
The research team, led by Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Sheffield, had the telescope scan certain parts of the sky in the near-infrared. They also used archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope.
a relativistic star is one with the equation of state of a special relativistic gas. This can happen when the core of a massive main sequence star becomes hot enough to generate electron-positron pairs. Stability analysis shows that such a star is only marginally bound, and is unstable to either collapse or explode. This instability is believed to limit the mass of main sequence stars to of the order of a couple of hundred solar masses or so
