- News

A researcher at the University of Sheffield has discovered the most massive stars ever found, using the European Southern Observatory´s (ESO) Very Large Telescope. Found within two young star clusters, NGC 3603 and RMC 136a, the stars weigh up to 300 times the mass of the Sun - a figure which doubles the previously accepted limit of solar mass.

The team found several stars with surface temperatures of over 40 000 degrees centigrade, and which are several million times brighter than our sun. Comparisons with models imply that many of these stars were born with masses in excess of 150 solar masses. One of the stars found in the R136 cluster - the star R136a1 -, is the most massive ever found, with a current mass of about 265 solar masses and with a birth mass which could have been as much as 320 times that of the Sun.

The cluster was discovered by a team of astronomers led by Paul Crowther, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Sheffield, who used ESO’s Very Large Telescope based in Chile, as well as archival data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The new results appear in a paper in the journal: ‘Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society’.

You can read the full story on the University of Sheffield website.

To find out more information about stars, why not look through the resource 'Stars and Forces' from the Association of Science Education’s Nature of Science series? Further space-themed resources can be found in the National STEM Centre’s eLibrary.