Scientists in london find most massive star ever!

LONDON - A big ball of burning gas light drifting through the neighboring galaxy may be the heaviest stars ever found - hundreds of times larger than the sun, scientists said Wednesday, after working hard for the first time.They say finding a star behind the so-called R136a1, may have weight as much as 320 solar masses. Astrophysicist Paul Crowther said the star of obesity - more than twice as heavy, as previously found - has slimmed down enough during its lifetime.In fact, it burned itself with such intensity that shines on nearly 10 million times the luminosity of the sun."Unlike humans, stars are born heavy and lose weight as they age," said Crowther, an astrophysicist at the University of Sheffield in northern England. "R136a1 already middle-aged and had undergone an intense weight loss program."Crowther said the giant was identified in the middle of the star cluster in the Tarantula Nebula, a cloud that formed from gas and dust in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the galaxy about 165,000 light years from our Milky Way.The biggest star is identified by a few giant Crowther and his team in an article in Monthly Notices Royal Astronomical Society.While other stars can be larger, especially the red-swelling known as red giants, they are much more severe.

 




However, the mass R136a1 and the like, which means they are tens of times larger than Earth's sun and they are bright and hot, too.Surface temperatures can exceed 40,000 degrees Celsius (72,000 degrees Fahrenheit), seven times hotter than the sun. They are also a few million times brighter, as gluttonous giant tears through their energy reserves much faster than their counterparts smaller.It also means that massive stars live fast and die young, rapidly spilling large amounts of material and set fire to himself in what was considered a spectacular explosion."The biggest live only 3 million years," said Crowther. "In astronomy was a very short time."Small life span is one of several reasons why the stars of obesity is very difficult to find. Another is that they are very rare, only formed in the densest star clusters.

Astronomers also have a limited range in which to find them. In clusters that are too far away, is not always possible to know whether the telescope had picked up on one or two heavyweight stars smaller in the near future.In this case, the team formerly known Crowther star checked to see if they can find an accurate measurement of their weight. The team examined data from archival Hubble Space Telescope and gather new readings from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope at Paranal in Chile.Scientists not involved in the find said the impressive results, although they cautioned it was still possible, though unlikely, that scientists have been puzzled two stars very close to one, single larger."What they characterize as a single massive star could actually be a binary system is too close to be resolved," said Mark Krumholz, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz.Both he and Phillip Massey, an astronomer at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, also warned that the weight of the star has been inferred using scientific models and that they have changed.But the two scientists said that the author has made a strong case, arguing that the solar material that was thrown from the hostile star in a binary system will produce far more powerful than X-rays have been detected.Crowther admitted that R136a1 could have a partner, but he said it was likely to be much smaller stars, which means that the star was born that is still pretty heavy - perhaps 300 solar masses rather than 320.