Among stars, heavyweight champ
Stellar record-holder weighs in at 265 times mass of sun
By Ron Cowen
Astronomers have discovered a star about 265 times the mass of the sun, more massive than any other star known in the universe. At birth, the hefty body tipped the scales at 320 suns, more than twice the generally accepted limit for a newborn.
Paul Crowther of the University of Sheffield in England and colleagues describe the star in an upcoming Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Crowther and collaborators examined massive stars in two clusters, one in the Milky Way and the other in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. The team used the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope atop Cerro Paranal in Chile and looked at archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope. Four stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud cluster, dubbed R136, had temperatures more than seven times that of the sun and were several million times brighter and tens of times larger.