Largest Star Ever Found

It's been a hot few weeks in the midwestern states. With the heat index creeping north of 100 degrees, the Sun's presence is being felt more so than normal. But, on one hand we are lucky. Lucky that we don't orbit the likes of the stars recently discovered by the European southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope.

These so-called monster stars are nearly 300 times the mass of the Sun and carry a brightness more than 10 million times our host star. Now that would make for a not summer.

O.k., o.k., I know the Earth would have never developed life around such a star, but you get the point. These stars are massive and incredibly bright. It is thought that, at their birth, these stars could have sustained masses up to 320 times the mass of the Sun. This is significant as it is about double the mass limit scientists once thought possible for star formation.

Scientists estimate the age of the heaviest of these newfound stars, the 265 solar mass R136a1 (what a name), at 1 million years. Sounds young in astronomical terms, but R136a1 is actually in the middle of its life cycle. This is because more massive stars age more quickly.

Simply, the more massive the star, the greater the gravitational force driving it to contract. In order to keep the star from collapsing in on itself, radiation pressure from nuclear fusion in the core pushes outward to create a hydrostatic equilibrium. The greater the gravitational force, the greater the rate of nuclear fusion. Meaning the star is going to burn through its nuclear fuel faster, hence die more quickly.

These are the first stars ever directly observed at such high mass, and they challenge the very tenants of stellar evolution. However, some argue that there it is possible that these stars were not born with high mass, but rather accumulated mass from mergers of normal stars. Since these stars do not live very long they are difficult to find and observe, so these questions may go unanswered. But perhaps this is the first step to re-imagining the process of star formation. Only time will tell.

Image Credit: ESO