The largest known star in the universe looks sharper in new photo

Astronomers at the Gemini South Telescope on Chile’s Cerro Pachón mountain announced last week Obtaining the sharpest image ever taken of R136a1, considered the most massive star known. According to research published in the scientific journal Astrophysical JournalThese are the sharpest images of the R136 cluster in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite dwarf galaxy orbiting our own. Milky Way.

The aim of the research was to pinpoint how the most massive stars, defined as having more than 100 times the mass of the Sun, form. While these blue supergiants inhabit the densely populated cores of star clusters, the biggest challenge is to observe them in the middle of cosmic dust..

Unlike our parent star, which has lived about half its estimated 10-billion-year lifespan, giant stars are “short-lived” and die relatively young, depleting their fuel reserves within a few million years.

How astronomers photographed star R136a1

To get the sharpest image of R136a1, astronomers used a technique known as the “speckle imager,” a noise filtering from the high-resolution imaging instrument Zorro in the Gemini South Telescope. In addition to adaptive optics, the technique consists of taking thousands of short-exposure images of the bright object and carefully processing the data. to virtually eliminate blur.

Observations from R136a1 so far have suggested that the star has a mass between 250 and 320 times the mass of the Sun. However, new Zorro observations using the speckle filter show that the giant star is actually 170 to 230 times the mass of our “only” star. Still, it remains the most massive star known.

ARTICLE Astrophysical Journal – DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ac8424.