The mammoth star is about 160,000 light-years from Earth and has a mass of 170 to 230 times that of the Sun.
Astronomers managed to take the clearest photo of it to date colossal star R136a1the largest star ever found in the universe.
The star had been observed before with the Hubble Space Telescope and other ground-based telescopes, but never with sufficient clarity. The new observation achieved a resolution three times better than Hubble’s and slightly better than the new James Webb Large Space Telescope.
The observation, made with the 8.1-meter-diameter Gemini South International Telescope in Chile, leads to the new estimate that the mammoth star in question, located about 160,000 light-years from Earth in the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud (a dwarf galaxy near our own), has a mass “only” 170 to 230 times that of the Sun, not the 250-320 times the previous estimate. Even so, he remains the biggest known star.
Scientists still do not fully understand how such large stars, with a mass at least 100 times that of our Sun, formed. Such giant stars are usually hidden in the “dense” hearts of dust-covered star clusters.
They are also short-lived and die young, having burned through their nuclear fuel in only a few million years (in comparison the Sun has not even completed half its expected 10 billion year life). The heavier-than-helium chemical elements in the universe are created during the cataclysmic explosive death of stars at least 150 times the mass of the Sun.
The researchers, led by Venu Kalari of the NOIRLab of the US National Science Foundation and the Department of Astronomy of the University of Chile, made the relevant publication in the astrophysics journal “The Astrophysical Journal”.
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