Astronomers have identified nine massive stars that are more than 100 times the mass of the sun. The team made the discovery using the Hubble Space Telescope.
The discovery of the star cluster named R136 is the largest sample of very massive stars identified to date and has raised many new questions about the formation of massive stars.
The international team of scientists, led by researchers from the University of Sheffield, combined images taken with the Wide Field Camera 3 with the unprecedented ultraviolet spatial resolution of the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) to successfully dissect the young star cluster in the ultraviolet for the first time.
R136 is only a few light-years across and is located in the Tarantula Nebula within the Large Magellanic Cloud about 170,000 light-years away. The young cluster hosts many extremely massive, hot, and luminous stars whose energy is mostly radiated in the ultraviolet—which is why the scientists probed the ultraviolet emission of the cluster.
As well as finding a total of nine very massive stars, more than 100 times more massive than the sun, the new study also revealed dozens of stars exceeding 50 solar masses.
