The Most Massive Star Known - R136a1 Will Blow Your Mind

When speaking of bigness among stars, you have to define your terms. There are heavy stras, and there are gigantic stars, in terms of sheer physical size. The heaviest star is thought to be R136a1. It’s 315 times more massive than our sun. It’s the most massive star known at this time. R136a1, lies about 163,000 light-years from Earth in the Tarantula Nebula. It’s part of the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies. R136a1 is what’s known as a Wolf-Rayet star. Its surface temperature is over 100,000 degrees F. It’s also the most luminous star known at more than 7 million times the luminosity of our sun. Although R136a1 is the most massive known star, it is not the largest, since it only stretches about 30 times the radius of our sun. The largest known star is UY Scuti, a hypergiant with a radius somewhere around 1,700 times larger than the sun. Its mass, however, is only 30 times that of our nearest star. Thanks for watching! #mostmassivestar #R136A1 #space Images credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser, ESA/NASA and E. Sabbi (ESA/STS cl), Chandra X-Ray Observatory Music credit: YouTube Audio Library Desert Planet - Quincas Moreira