Study: The largest star in the universe is smaller than thought

The star R136a1 has a mass 320 times the mass of the sun.

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It turned out that the largest star observed in the universe is not the size that was previously estimated, as new observations showed, which is likely to apply to other large stars.

The star "R136a1" is located in the Tarantula Nebula, among a group of stars in the so-called Magellanic Cloud, near the Milky Way, which includes Earth, and its discovery dates back to 1985.

In 2010, a team of astronomers classified it as the largest star ever observed, with a mass 320 times the size of the sun.

In the latest study to be published in the Astrophysical Journal, a team using the Gemini North in Hawaii and the South Gemini telescope in Chile lowered its mass estimate to between 170 and 230 solar masses.

"Our results show that the largest star we currently know is not as massive as we thought," said the study's lead author, an astronomer at the American "Noir Lab" who runs the Gemini telescope and Venu Kalari.

"This indicates that the upper limit of the stellar mass may also be smaller than we thought," he added in a statement issued by the center.

It is difficult to observe the largest and brightest stars in the universe, such as R136a1.

This is due firstly to the fact that its life span is relatively very short, as it is limited to a few million years, while the life span of the Sun is 10 billion years.

The second reason is that they are generally located within compressed stellar groups surrounded by stellar dust, which makes it difficult to accurately measure their brightness, knowing that it is precisely this brightness that allows determining the mass of the star.

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