Monday May 28, 2012

JAPAN NEWS AND DISCUSSION

Scientists find most massive star ever discovered

World Jul. 22, 2010 - 04:52AM JST ( 10 )

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10 Comments

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goodDonkeyJul. 22, 2010 - 08:41AM JST

“The biggest live only 3 million years,”

Livin' Large, Dying Young!"

Cool Story.
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lemurJul. 22, 2010 - 09:32AM JST

"That also means that massive stars live fast and die young, quickly shedding huge amounts of material and burning themselves out in what are thought to be spectacular explosions."

Sounds like James Dean, Marilyn, JFK, and Elvis all rolled into one.
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Klein2Jul. 22, 2010 - 09:50AM JST

"ball of brightly burning gas " "obese star" "shines with luminosity of"

Oh brother. This is a science writer? It is not burning at all. It is not obese or shiny. It is a freaking star. Why do people have to dumb down the concept of "star?"

For me, the most interesting part of the article is that the mass was inferred using a model, but the star is obviously an outlier. Must be a cool model if it predicts outliers... or else....hmm.

Anyway, the discovery here, I think, is that stars this massive tend to move off of the curve to red-giantness or they collapse. Finding one this big that stays on the ... well, it used to called main sequence?...curve implies that the physics are out there on the edge.
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lemurJul. 22, 2010 - 10:05AM JST

Being in the middle of the Tarantula Nebula probably has something to do with its size. The "sprawling cloud of gas and dust" has most likely fed this monster over the years. I can imagine long streams of matter disappearing into its maw.

Is this a blue giant, by the way?
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lemurJul. 22, 2010 - 11:46AM JST

Yeah, I thought the prose was a little turgid, too, but I think the astrophysicist himself started it off by referring to the star as 'middle-aged' and having 'lost weight'. Such anthropomorphism and incorrect terminology surely set the tone for most 'science reporting' unfortunately.
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BeelzebubJul. 22, 2010 - 11:50AM JST

Sizzle, sizzle obese star Thanks to JT I know where you are
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NoripinheadJul. 22, 2010 - 02:00PM JST

“R136a1 is already middle-aged and has undergone an intense weight loss program.”

Must have been on the Hollywood Diet - you know, the diet of the stars.
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Klein2Jul. 22, 2010 - 07:04PM JST

lemur. I think it is not a blue giant. That is the exciting thing about it. I still remember a graph from a book I had as a kid. Most stars can be arranged on a graph of luminosity and mass. And you can just make a line going from black hole to red giant. And we are about in the middle somewhere, as main sequence. Sol.

This is all from memory, so I might have it wrong, but anyway this star is quite massive, but still luminous. That is rare and puts them way off the "line" so the speak. How they form and die is probably not known. How they can be so luminous despite their mass is also a puzzle.

That this is be most massive ever found suggests that its life span and characteristics are that much weirder.
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SuperLibJul. 23, 2010 - 11:10PM JST

Bigger than Michael Jackson? I'll admit I shelled out 2,000 yen to see that piece of crap movie they just released about him. Can't say I did the same thing for a massive ball of gas.
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miyazawa3Jul. 25, 2010 - 12:38PM JST

Ohh scientists you just found it, The Gautama Budda said there are unlimited amount of massive stars in the sky