SoylentNews

takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

The Hubble Space Telescope has found previously unknown massive stars at the edge of the Milky Way [bbc.com]:

Hubble has probed a clutch of monster stars about 170,000 light-years away on the edge of our Milky Way Galaxy. Some two dozen behemoths were identified, all with masses in excess of a hundred times that of the Sun. Four were known previously, including the remarkable colossus catalogued as R136a1, which is 250 times as massive as our home star. But the new survey finds many more of the super-objects in a tight patch of sky within the Large Magellanic Cloud.

"In just a tiny bit of this satellite galaxy, we see perhaps a couple of dozen stars with more than a 100 solar masses, of which nine are in a tight core just a few light-years across," explained Prof Paul Crowther from Sheffield University, UK. "But that two dozen number - that's probably more than are in the entire Milky Way Galaxy for this type of star," he told BBC News.

The observations are to be published shortly in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society [oxfordjournals.org] [DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stw273]. They build on earlier work reported in 2010 [bbc.co.uk] that first described R136a1 - the most massive and most luminous star identified to date. That study used data gathered principally by a ground-based telescope in Chile. This follow-up research employed the pin-sharp resolution and ultraviolet sensitivity of the orbiting Hubble telescope to tease out yet more detail. In 2010, astronomers saw four monster stars including R136a1 in the central core. Thanks to Hubble, they detect a further five. The stars are not only extremely massive, but they are also extremely bright. Together, these nine stars outshine our Sun by a factor of 30 million, said Prof Crowther.

Also at Futurity [futurity.org] and the University of Sheffield [sheffield.ac.uk].

Original Submission