British Astronomers Find Nine ‘Monster’ Stars

monster galaxy star

Nine “monster” stars which are 30 million times brighter than the Sun have been spotted by British astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope.

  • The cluster of stars around 170,000 light years from Earth is the largest group of very massive stars ever identified.
  • They were discovered by an international team led by astronomers from Sheffield University.
  • The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into orbit in 1990 and is nearing the end of its life, but is still proving useful.
  • The cluster is called R136, and measures a few light years across.
  • It sits in the Tarantula Nebula inside the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. It is extremely large, hot and bright stars whose energy is radiated mainly in the ultra violet.
  • Nine of the stars are more than 100 times the mass of the Sun – and were described as “monster” on the Hubble Twitter account – while dozens are 50 times larger. But while they are huge, none of them are larger than R126a1 – also in the Tarantula Nebula – which is the most massive star in the known universe and 250 times larger than our Sun.
  • The discovery of five more huge solar masses could pose questions about how they all formed.

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