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R136a1, Most Massive Star Ever Discovered, Is 320 Times Larger Than Sun

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Author Topic: R136a1, Most Massive Star Ever Discovered, Is 320 Times Larger Than Sun  (Read 134 times)
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Abraxas
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« on: October 31, 2010, 03:59:46 pm »

Still, the mass of R136a1 and its ilk means they're tens of times bigger than the Earth's sun and they're brighter and hotter, too.

Surface temperatures can surpass 40,000 degrees Celsius (72,000 degrees Fahrenheit), seven times hotter than the sun. They're also several million times brighter, because the greedy giants tear through their energy reserves far faster than their smaller counterparts.

That also means that massive stars live fast and die young, quickly shedding huge amounts of material and burning themselves out in what are thought to be spectacular explosions.

"The biggest live only 3 million years," Crowther said. "In astronomy that's a very short time."

Small lifespans are one of several reasons why these obese stars are so hard to find. Another is that they're extremely rare, forming only in the densest star clusters.

Astronomers also have a limited range in which to look for them. In clusters that are too far away, it isn't always possible to tell if a telescope has picked up on one heavyweight star or two smaller ones in close proximity.

In this case, Crowther's team re-examined previously known stars to see if they could find an accurate measurement of their weight. The team reviewed archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope and gathered new readings from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope at Paranal in Chile.

Scientists who weren't involved in the find said the results were impressive, although they cautioned it was still possible, although unlikely, that scientists had confused two very close stars for a bigger, single one.

"What they're characterizing as a single massive star could in fact be a binary system too close to be resolved," said Mark Krumholz, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Both he and Phillip Massey, an astronomer with the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, also cautioned that the star's weight had been inferred using scientific models and that those were subject to change.

But both scientists said the authors had made a strong case, arguing that the solar material being thrown off from feuding stars in a binary system would produce much more powerful X-rays than have been detected.

Crowther acknowledged that R136a1 could have a partner, but he said it was likely to be a much smaller star, meaning that the star's its birth weight was still considerable - perhaps 300 solar masses instead of 320.
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