Biggest Star Ever Found Nearby…Only 969,973,186,575,295,200 Miles Away.
Date: July 30, 2010 | Author: Bob NovellaCategory: Skepticism | Comments: 2 » |
Scientists have found the biggest star ever, and its a porker.
Up until now, If you asked those in the know how big stars can get, you’d likely get answers around 150 solar masses.
One solar mass of course being the sun’s mass which is 4.4 nonillion pounds (4.4 followed by 30 zeros). To put that a little more into perspective, that about 333,000 earths
This new star has an astounding 265 solar masses. Since it’s been shedding weight through it’s solar wind for millions of years, scientists calculate that it weighed a staggering 320 solar masses when it first ignited.
Of course they named it but don’t get your hopes up. It’s not anything interesting like Porktarus. They call it R136a1. Come on guys…biggest star ever and that’s the best you can do?
What happened to the scientists who came up with quark names like charm and strange?
To throw some more stats at you:
- It’s 165,000 light years away inside the Tarantula Nebula in the nearby dwarf galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud.
- It’s 30 times the radius of our Sun which is not as big as other stars like red giants but they don’t have near the mass this one does.
- It’s ten million times brighter than the sun.
Astronomer Paul Crowther of the University of Sheffield said:
“If it replaced the Sun in our Solar System, it would outshine [it] by as much as the Sun currently outshines the full Moon,”
It’s so bright because the bigger a star is, the more voracious its appetite. Even though it has many times the mass of the sun, it will burn it all up in perhaps 3 or 4 million years. Our sun with its meager one solar mass and slower burn will last billions.
If you could fly out there and get a closeup of this star you would notice that it doesn’t have nice clean edges like our sun. It would be kind of fuzzy. This is because its solar wind would be carrying away so much mass that it makes the disc of the star look indistinct.
As you looked around you probably wouldn’t see any planets either; that’s because stars this big explode before planets can do anything really interesting.
So why is this star so big?
In our milky-way the gas resource just aren’t there for stars to get much bigger than 150 solar masses. This means that this star is giving us a glimpse at what some of the first stars that existed after the big bang were like when resources were much more plentiful.
Professor Crowther told BBC News.
“The bigger picture to this research is that it gives us confidence that there were probably more of these really massive stars in much greater numbers early on in the Universe,”
The other interesting thing that surprised me was that stars this big can produce such titanic explosions that there could be nothing left to form a black hole. They could deliver all their heavy elements into the universe at once which of course brings the concept of recycling to its ultimate expression.
2 Responses to “Biggest Star Ever Found Nearby…Only 969,973,186,575,295,200 Miles Away.”
By elsie22 on Jul 31, 2010 | Reply
Clearly the powers that be need to consult you when they name stars. I know that naming conventions are important, but I think the stars need nicknames. Porktarus is more fun than R136a1.
By KathyO on Aug 1, 2010 | Reply
What I found most interesting about this was comparing it with a giant star like VY Canis Majoris.
VY Canis Majoris is about 2000 solar diameters, and 20 solar masses.
R136a1 is about 30 solar diameters and 265 solar masses.
So these two ginormous stars are respectively a puffball and a lead weight.