Astronomers have captured the clearest image to date of the colossal star R136a1, the largest star ever discovered in the universe. The star has been observed before with the Hubble Space Telescope and other ground-based telescopes, but never with sufficient clarity. The new observation achieved a resolution three times better than Hubble’s and slightly better than the new James Webb Large Space Telescope.

An observation by the 8.1-meter Gemini International Southern Telescope in Chile has led to a new estimate that the giant star in question is about 160,000 light-years from Earth in the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud (a dwarf galaxy close to ours), has a mass of “only” 170-230 times the mass of the Sun, and not 250-320 times the previous estimate. Despite this, he remains the biggest known star.

Scientists still do not fully understand how such large stars were formed, the mass of which is at least 100 times the mass of our Sun. Such giant stars usually hide in the “dense” cores of dusty star clusters.

They are also short-lived and die young, burning out their nuclear fuel in just a few million years (for comparison, the Sun has not lived half of its expected life of 10 billion years). Chemical elements heavier than helium in the universe are created during the catastrophic explosive death of stars at least 150 times the mass of the Sun.

The researchers, led by Venu Kalari of the NOIRLab of the US National Science Foundation and the Department of Astronomy at the University of Chile, made a corresponding publication in the astrophysical journal The Astrophysical Journal.

^{Source: RES-IPE}