Astronomers used the Gemini South telescope in Chile to capture the sharpest image yet of R136a1, the largest known star in the universe. It’s located 160,000 light-years from Earth in the R136 star cluster in the center of the Tarantula Nebula, which is a part of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf companion galaxy of the Milky Way.
The team used Gemini South’s Zorro instrument to determine that this giant star may be 170 to 230 times the mass of the Sun, which makes R136a1 the most massive known star. R136a1 has been observed by NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope as well as multiple ground-based telescopes, but none of them have been able to obtain images sharp enough to pick out all the individual stellar members of the nearby cluster. In related news, the infamous Wow! Signal may have originaed from the Sagittarius constellation.
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Our results show us that the most massive star we currently know is not as massive as we had previously thought. This suggests that the upper limit on stellar masses may also be smaller than previously thought,” ” said Venu M. Kalari, astronomer and lead author of the paper announcing this result.
