How do you discover the largest star ever discovered? Not a big star, but a star so big that you have to invent a class for it? Well, when Paul Crowther discovered the hypergiant star R136a1, he used a Very Large Telescope. That’s the official name for the device, which Crowther and colleagues from the University of Sheffield in England used to scan the skies around the Large Magellanic Cloud, 165,000 lightyears from earth. It was there they discovered the largest star ever seen.
You think the sun is big and hot? Guess again. R136a1 is 10 million times brighter than the sun and has a solar mass of, get this, 265 times the mass of our sun! Even more startling, this star used to be even larger before middle age shrank it from its birth mass of 320 solar units. (This is more than twice the original ceiling size of stars, which was thought to be 150 times the size of our sun.)
“Owing to the rarity of these monsters, I think it is unlikely that this new record will be broken any time soon,” Crowther said. The star is not visible to the naked eye, or even with a backyard telescope. You need to pay a visit to your local observatory and dial in some help from the Hubble in order to catch a glimpse of the largest star ever seen.
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