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Scientists Discover Biggest Star
Hugh Pickens writes "Scientists at the University of Sheffield have discovered the most massive stellar giant, R136a1 measured at 265 solar masses, using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile and data from the Hubble Space Telescope. It's in the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small 'satellite' galaxy which orbits the Milky Way. Previously, the heaviest known stars were around 150 times the mass of the Sun, known as the 'Eddington Limit,' and this was believed to be close to the cosmic size limit because as stars get larger, the amount of energy created in their cores grows faster than the force of gravity which holds them together. 'Because of their proximity to the Eddington Limit they lose mass at a pretty high rate,' says Professor Paul Crowther, the chief researcher in the Sheffield team. Hyper-stars like R136a1 are believed to be formed from several young stars merging together, and are only found in the very heart of stellar clusters. R136a1 is believed to have a surface temperature of more than 40,000 degrees Celsius, and is 10 million times brighter than the Sun. Crowther adds that R136a1 is about as big as stars can get. 'Owing to the rarity of these monsters, I think it is unlikely that this new record will be broken any time soon.'"
"Owing to the rarity of these monsters, I think it is unlikely that this new record will be broken any time soon.""
Owing to the size of the universe, I think it is likely that this new record will be broken sometime soon.
Two theories, now let's sit back and see who's right!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Anyone could find something if it's that big! Wake me up when they find the smallest one! :p
comparison animations, as we are now more inconsequential than ever!
Maybe they should have named it Rieshai instead of using numbers.
Clearly obesity is not just a problem on earth.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I'll need more sunscreen.
or actually, how does this compare to VY canis majoris?
One thing the article didn't mention was the radius of the new star. It's obviously larger than the sun, but is it the "largest" star found or simply the most massive? It seems with that kind of mass it might be denser than your average supergiant and have less volume, and therefore less radius.
On the contrary, the record is probably being broken currently, or maybe even was broken millions/billions of years ago, but the light has yet to reach us, our technology is unable to detect it, or we arnt looking in the right direction.
For anyone curious, as I was, what the surface temperature of our star is: 5500 degrees C
My source was NASA's world book page (then again, it goes on to state that our solar system has nine planets, so trust NASA at your own risk)
If I had a nickel for every time I had a nickel, I'd be richcursive!
... a star so large if you swapped it with our sun it's surface would extend past Saturn's orbit.
I puzzled over this for a bit too, but this newly discovered star is the most massive discovered. The largest known star in terms of size is still VY Canis Majoris at ~2000 solar radii, but only ~20 times the mass of the Sun.
she breaks the Eddington limit! (sorry, couldn't help myself)
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Here is the link to the research paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.3284
The article states that R136a1 is 265 solar masses, however it doesn't say how big it is.
VY Canis Majoris is 2,100 times the size of the sun, and 230,000 times the size of Earth. It is so huge, that if it occupied the centre of our solar system, its boundaries would be Saturn's orbit.
If R136a1 is the heaviest star, then it must be considerably more dense than VY Canis Majoris, but I find the latter to be far more impressive.
These scientists are quite late to the party. Tamilians had discovered the Biggest Star, The Super Star, Rajnikant way back in 1975.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"Unlike humans, these stars are born heavy and lose weight as they age,"
If I get burned to death by Johnathan Winters I'm going to be PISSED!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I always though that the biggest star was Prince :/
is that discoveries like that require extensive use of one's imagination to visualise what the biggest star, the longest gravitational jet or the exoplanets that have been "imaged directly" actually look like... An "artist's impression" is to astrophysics as artificial flavouring is to food.
I lol'd
We should never need a star more than 265 solar masses.
256 solar masses? I thought everything over 10 solar masses collapses into itself, forming a black hole. What's going on with this star?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The more massive the star, the shorter its life as it burns through its fuel more quickly.
Stars smaller than the sun are believed to endure for hundreds of billions or even trillions of years.
Stars of near the suns size last for billions to tens of billions of years.
Large stars are believed to last for tens or hundreds of millions of years.
The largest previously known stars at up to a hundred times the suns mass are believed to live for only a few hundred thousand or million years.
How long will this star last? Millennia? Centuries? Decades?
It is merely a revenue generator.
TSIA
How do they measure that? As an amateur astronomer, I understand relative magnitude but...wow. I'm guessing they use some other method? Also, would this star be considered a super-massive blue giant or...?
she's measured in solar masses.
Ready and ... Start!
Since R136a1 is a rather boring name, based on the physical description I propose the name "Mother-in-Law of All Stars".
I need that in units I can comprehend:
The mass of the sun is 1.99x10^30kg. The average mass of a book is 340g. There are 21,814,555 books cataloged by the Library of Congress. So, 265 solar masses * 1.99x10^30kg/solar mass * 1000g/kg / 340g/book / 21,814,555 books/LoC = 7.1x10^25LoC. Therefore, the new star is equivalent in mass to 71YLoC (yotta Libraries Of Congress). Wow, that's a big star!
Céline Dion is really pissed that she was just over taken
256 solar masses should be enough for anyone.
From article: "Unlike humans, these stars are born heavy and lose weight as they age," Crowther said.
This is obviously wrong. Some humans are plump when young, and turn into skeletons as they age.
In fact, this is commonly observed among those humans who, ironically, are called ``stars''.
Here is a posting on Science Magazine's ScienceNow, and here is the original journal article originally published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomy Society. I think it is always better, when possible to refer to original sources when talking about scientific issues. Scientific discussions can become muddled when translated by journalists.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Eddington I guess was a hog for headlines, why would he need to say there is a limit to anything, on what grounds did he base it on, did he get core samples of our sun, was he anywhere near the sun to see if maybe there might be some form of material missed in his calculations to know how the sun keeps its light (fire) going....
I find too many space scientists are using their theories and saying that this is fact. I just hope now we can have an end to this, and go on thinking the universe is limitless like the church tells us it is....
Marlon Brando. Old news.
Have gnu, will travel.
"Crowther adds that R136a1 is about as big as stars can get."
This week, last week we thought they could only get to about 60% of this size.
You'd think the scientist would be a bit more cautious before making a leap like this after a previous widely accepted theory was crushed. Of course tomorrow someone will be assuring us all that scientific theories are really more like facts than current, subject to change, understanding.
Of course theories are not mere guesses but they are often given as much too much weight in the scientific world as they are given too little in the civilian.
Additionally, there is the bogus idea that a revised theory should still be considered a theory. Instead a revised theory is now no more than a hypothesis, requiring fresh predictions (to be tested against new observation not previous data) and verification and requiring the fresh application of Occam's Razor (since a revised theory is also usually going to have additional complexity to patch up the previous theory).
Scientsist Discover Biggest Star : Kirstie Alley.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I thought the answer would be "Jones".
I've read numerous articles in the past dealing with supermassive stars and as often as not, the largest stars turn out to be binaries, i.e. what they thought was a 300 solar mass star was simply two 150 solar mass stars. However, I read the paper on arxiv (http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1007/1007.3284v1.pdf) and it appears that the scientists have ruled that out. The thinking is that if it was actually two unresolved stars revolving around each other, their stellar winds would collide and produce x-rays, which are not evident.
However, they do rely heavily on models to come up with the theoretical mass. Without an orbiting companion, it's currently impossible to measure the mass reliably except for depending on those models. Refined models may result in different masses.
Another thing to consider is this. The Eddington limit refers to a star in equilibrium. However, such a large star is not in equilibrium. In the paper, they estimate its original mass to be about 320 solar masses, with 265 being the current mass. Obviously, since the star exceeds the Eddington limit, it is shedding its outer layers as expected. In this case, it has shed a whopping 55 solar massses since its birth...
Beautiful.
An accurate and descriptive term.
Anything else would detract from the truth--something simply is what it is.
We must get sales and marketing involved for the next one, though!
We need a snappy name--something that really pops--for several of them working together, perhaps arranged in some sort of an array?
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Summary error. Limit to star masses ~60solar. Because the collapse of such a star to start internal fusion reaction would require such density as to immediately cause the star to go nova, ejecting the still-accreting star. This was figured to be bollocks in the 90's AT LEAST because in 92 I investigated an area less than 10AU across that had to have at least 150 solar masses amongst two stars (60 and 90) and another case where 220 solar masses were shared amongst no more than three ignited stars, the largest one being 120 solar masses for most likely setup.
I know because I did an undergrad dissertation on supermassive stellar objects, which I reckoned everyone else would be yibbering on about supermassive black holes. I figured I'd look into supermassive STARS so I wouldn't be competing with others' efforts. Didn't work because it went to a prof who
a) liked supermassive black holes in galaxies
b) thought stars >60 solar masses were impossible and just cranks believed it
Nearly got him crying when trying to get him to justify the mark he gave... >-)
That's a puppy...There's one that is assumed to be just a gas cloud it's so big, except it's an eclipsing binary, so that's a HEAVY gas cloud and small enough that a star will go around it often enough we can see the light curve change.
It would extend three times that diameter (no less than 3 billion km).
But because of that damn cool.
Mind you, may find that is an extended atmosphere of a supermassive star that is shucking out gurt big lumps of atmosphere and not really a star per se at all.
Bummer...
then again, it goes on to state that our solar system has nine planets, so trust NASA at your own risk
Argh, this nonsense again. The IAU dropped the ball and we remain without an adequate definition of what a planet is. "Clearing the neighborhood" remains undefined and there are ways to define "neighborhood", as a large loci in space-time around the trajectory of the object in question, so that Pluto, and perhaps even Ceres and some of the dwarf planet candidates, clear their neighborhoods. The point here is that while a considerable number of astronomers intend a particular definition of "neighborhood" (as a spherical shell around the Sun), that definition has not been adopted nor, I might add, does it seem all that useful.
Semantically, it's also a mess since we have "minor planets" and now "dwarf planets" which are not "planets". Also, it just confuses the issue for the billions of people who were taught for decades that Pluto was a planet. I find the redefinition of "planet" to be inconsiderate of their needs and as a result rather frivilous abuse of IAU's power. Just because we had a similar screw up back when Ceres was demoted as a planet, doesn't mean that we need to repeat this error.
Finally, this definition only applies to the Solar System. We'd have enormous difficult applying this definition anywhere else. It would be hard and time consuming to verify the dynamics of other star systems in enough detail to distinguish between planets and dwarf planets using such a definition. And those systems may have orbital dynamics that are far different from the nearly circular orbits of planets in the Solar System.
Personally, I have no problems with eight, nine, or hundreds of planets. But I think it reasonable that the definition of planet have a scientific basis. That bit is the common view I share with the people who came up with the current definition. But I think it's been an embarrassment to come up with the current weak and unuseful definition and then attempt to sell it as being scientific (remember the old definition happens to be much more well-defined and hence, scientific than the new one, people were just concerned about the growing number of objects that would be considered planets).
Personally, I find it more credible that we're just seeing a continuation (in intellectually mutated form) of the old, irrational opposition to Pluto's original naming. Its first two letters, "P" and "L" happen to be, either by coincidence or artifice, the initials of Percival Lowell, the man who had established and funded the observatory that discovered Pluto.
It seems to me that this Eddington limit idea depends on all the matter that's gravitationally bound to the star's atmosphere participate in the fusion reactions at the core of the star. What about matter that doesn't participate in those kinds of reactions? Wouldn't a preponderance of dark matter allow a star to form that's much bigger than the Eddington limit since the dark matter wouldn't be participating in energy releasing fusion reactions?
And why isn't it possible that this star is one such?
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
It's gotta be, right?
I'm curious, does anyone know how/if they can tell it's not a binary star system, i.e. two stars that are each below the Eddington limit?
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
R136a1!!?? Are you kidding me? Why not Biff? Biff is a nice name.
...it's a space station.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai