"Monster Stars"

[Recusant]

Amazing discovery of a group of huge young stars in a relatively small region of space:

"Hubble Unveils Monster Stars" | NASA

This Hubble image shows the central region of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The young and dense star cluster R136 can be seen at the lower right of the image. This cluster contains hundreds of young blue stars, among them the most massive star detected in the universe so far.
Credits: NASA, ESA, P Crowther (University of Sheffield)

Astronomers using the unique ultraviolet capabilities of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have identified nine monster stars with masses over 100 times the mass of the sun in the star cluster R136. This makes it the largest sample of very massive stars identified to date.

The results, which will be published in the monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, raise many new questions about the formation of massive stars.

An international team of scientists using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has combined images taken with the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) with the unprecedented ultraviolet spatial resolution of the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) to successfully dissect the young star cluster R136 in ultraviolet light for the first time.

R136 is only a few light-years across and is located in the Tarantula Nebula within the Large Magellanic Cloud, about 170,000 light-years away. The young cluster hosts many extremely massive, hot and luminous stars whose energy is mostly radiated in the ultraviolet range of its light spectrum. This is why the scientists probed the ultraviolet emission of the cluster.

As well as finding dozens of stars exceeding 50 solar masses, this new study was able to reveal a total number of nine very massive stars in the cluster, all more than 100 times more massive than the sun. However, the current record holder R136a1 does keep its place as the most massive star known in the universe, at more than 250 solar masses. The detected stars are not only extremely massive, but also extremely bright. Together these nine stars outshine the sun by a factor of 30 million.

[Continues . . .]

[Tank]

The more we look the more there is to be amazed at.

[Crow]

The more we look the more there is to be amazed at.

And we have seen pretty much fuck all so far. I was watching a Jim Al-Khalili documentary the other week on BBC4 and it hadn't dawned on me before how fresh and immature our understanding of the universe actually is, it is still less than a hundred years.

[Tank]

The more we look the more there is to be amazed at.

And we have seen pretty much fuck all so far. I was watching a Jim Al-Khalili documentary the other week on BBC4 and it hadn't dawned on me before how fresh and immature our understanding of the universe actually is, it is still less than a hundred years.

Quite so. I can't wait to see what the James Web IR space telescope reveals.

[xSilverPhinx]

They'll be a huge collection of black holes in the very distant future.