A few weeks ago I reported that Protons may be smaller than originally thought , today I’m wondering if scientists are just sitting around kicking themselves at the moment as it has been discovered that stars can in fact grow more than 150 times the size of our own sun, the “upper limit” estimate originally believed possible by much of the scientific community. The new star is around 2 times as big as that “upper limit.”
The newly discovered massive star called Star R136a1 is gigantic (to put it lightly), just look at the comparison chart shown above, the really big sun we can only see a small part of, that’s R136a1, it’s so big it wouldn’t even fit in the picture. The newly discovered sun is so big you could fit our sun inside R136a1 as many times as you could fit Earth into Jupiter.
The star was given it’s name because it was found in the R136 star cluster and is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, 165,000 light-years from our own galaxy. The star is also part of a galaxy that has shown other objects bigger than 150 solar masses.
According to ESO, when the star was first born, around 1 million years ago, it weighed as much as much as 320 times the weight of our own Sun, however it now sits closer to 265 solar masses. Take that number and if you do that math that means in one million years the star has expelled more than 50 of our stars in terms of solar mass.
As IO9 points out, your Ray-Bans won’t protect you from the powers of this suns rays which are 10 million times brighter than our own Sun.
Scientists don’t believe a star twice as big as this newly discovered star will pop up anytime soon…I don’t know what to believe anymore, it seems like they have discovered a galaxy of giants and the rules of science are being broken quite a bit lately.
Just think about this for a second. Scientists are guessing at most of these things. There’s no simple way to prove that the masses are anywhere near accurate. Think about the upper limit, what is this based on? This is as silly as the Drake Equation. Just think of the universe and how poorly understood this is. They are talking multi-verses now, but non-scientists have talked about these for years. The truth is that none of these guys can really prove what they are claiming. I’m not sure that we can say any of this defies physics, cause apparently we are sort of sure there too. What do we know about the earth? Very little, don’t expect these geniuses to tell much about space.