Astronomers have spotted a cluster of stars containing the most massive stars known in our universe using the Hubble Space Telescope.
About 170,000 light years away lies the Tarantula Nebula, in the heart of the Large Magellanic Cloud. Deep within that lies a cluster of stars known as R136. While astronomers have known about this cluster of stars, what wasn’t known is how large some of them are.
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Combining images from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, together with a special ultraviolet spectrograph (which breaks down light into its component colours), the international team found dozens of stars that were 50 times larger than our sun. They also found nine stars that were 100 times bigger.
They are extremely bright: those nine stars alone outshine our sun by 30 million times.
But more spectacularly, the team found a star that was more than 250 times more massive.
What intrigues astronomers is how these stars have formed.
They believe that incredibly massive stars like these form through the merger of smaller binary stars (two stars that share a central orbit). However, it’s believed that these types of mergers don’t happen often, leading researchers to believe that massive stars such as those found in R136 can happen through star formation.
Hubble’s replacement, the James Webb Space Telescope, is set to launch in 2018.
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