Ginormous Star detected

[n2doc]

MOST MASSIVE STAR DETECTED
Evidence suggests a newly found star is more than 300 times bigger than the sun -- twice the size of anything previously discovered.

By Irene Klotz
Wed Jul 21, 2010 08:10 AM ET

Get big, die young. Such is the fate of behemoth stars, the largest of which are about 150 times the mass of the sun. A new study, however, finds evidence for stars more than twice that size, including an uber-giant so luminous that it makes the light of our sun look no brighter than the glow of the full moon in comparison.

Isolating the light of the biggest stars is a difficult and tedious process. Massive stars are rare, distant, short-lived and crammed inside dense clusters that are shrouded in dust. In the past, reports of stars up to 2,000 times the size of the sun all turned out to be clusters of stars, not single, massive objects.

"People have been trying to find the most massive star and to determine the upper mass limit of stars, but it's like prospecting for gold. You have to sift through a whole lot of junk and there's also a lot of fool's gold," said Rochester Institute of Technology astronomer Donald Figer.

Armed with new high-resolution imagery, an international team of astronomers is throwing down the gauntlet again with studies on NGC 3603, a very young star cluster located about 22,000 light-years away in the Milky Way's Carina spiral arm, and RMC 136a, which resides in the Tarantula Nebula, located 165,000 light-years away in our neighbor galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud.


more

http://news.discovery.com/space/massive-star-cluster.html


http://news.discovery.com/space/massive-star-cluster.html

[derby378]

1. And R136a1 still isn't as big as Sarah Palin's mouth

:evilgrin:

[formercia]

2. +100

:rofl:

[mike_c]

3. palin's mouth is a black hole...

...that spins faster than you can imagine, emitting squawks of energy whenever an idea penetrates her event horizon.

edit: oops, meant to reply to derby! :rofl:

[derby378]

4. Hey, not bad!

It's an honor to be pwn3d by you. :hi:

[AlecBGreen]

5. 300 times bigger = largest star?

I think they mean 300 times more "massive."

By volume, there are stars WAY more than 300 times larger than our sun

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEheh1BH34Q&feature=related

Red Giants have run out of hydrogren & helium and begun fusing heavier elements. In doing so they expand greatly. This is fate of our sun. By 9 billion years of age or so it will puff up so large it will swallow Mercury, Venus & Earth and possibly Mars!

In the video, the star Aldebaran is the left eye (as seen from earth) of Taurus. Its easy to find in the winter for us in the northern hemisphere. Just look for Orion and look to the right.





Antares A is another monster and it can be seen (again, in the northern hemisphere) during the summer. Its right smack in the middle of Scorpius.





Scorpius is in full swing this time of year. See if you can find it tonight :)