Massive Blue Supergiant Challenges Theory of How Big a Star Can Be

Welcome to the Tarantula Nebula, home to heavy-weight stars. Using data from the Hubble Space Telescope and Very Large Telescope in Chile, scientists have found a star estimated at about 265 times the mass of the sun. That makes it by far the most massive star ever found, and challenges astronomers' notions of just how big a star can get. The Tarantula Nebula is 165,000 light years away in the the Large Magellenic Cloud galaxy. This star, called R136a1, is located in the R136 stellar cluster; with 10 million times the luminosity of the sun, it's the brightest of a bevy of massive stars recently discovered. The finding, published earlier this month in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, may require scientists to come up with a new stellar life cycle for the most massive stars. The life a star leads depends on its mass, and the previously ...