Thought To Have Never Been Possible
Max Nordby
A new star discovered in the Tarantula Nebula is the largest, heaviest, and hottest star ever discovered. It’s 265 times larger than our sun 10 million times brighter than it too, its surface can surpass 40,000c which is seven times hotter than our sun. Astronomers believed that stars were only able to get up to 150 solar masses but this new giant can be up to as much as 320 solar masses. It was discovered by Paul Crowther in Chili and by the Hubble telescope, 165,000 light years away. Crowther said that it doesn’t seem likely that this star was created jut by gas and dust but with other smaller stars to create one massive one. The star is middle aged and has actually been getting smaller. The largest of stars only live to about three million years old. Other people think that it could possibly be two very large stars right next to each other because it is so hard to differentiate from that far way.
The reason I think that this is important is because we were wrong about how large stars could get. So now we have to make sure that this star is for real and not two stars really close to each other, and it’s just awesome! Now we have a new scale that we have to use not 150 solar masses but now up to 320, that’s huge. It just shows how little we have actually found in the universe and how much more there is to discover. There is a cool little video that I am posting that shows just how tiny we are, but it doesn’t have this new star on it.

Web sites: http://www.news.com.au/technology/obese-star-r136a1-265-times-bigger-than-the-sun/story-e6frfro0-1225895352201
http://discovermagazine.com/2011/jan-feb/83
Sun Video http://megavideo.com/?v=4R2Y3TWF