Holy Crap! I am small (and large). <hr> Astronomical numbers add up to brightest star By KENNETH CHANG New York Times ATLANTA -- Astronomers have spotted what they believe is the biggest, brightest star they have ever seen -- and indeed bigger than can be explained by the usual theories of how stars form. The star, known as LBV 1806-20, is 5 million to 40 million times as bright as the sun, at least 150 times as massive and at least 200 times as wide, astronomers reported last week at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society here. Next to LBV 1806-20, the sun would appear as minuscule as Mercury does next to the sun. Dr. Steven Eikenberry, a professor of astronomy at the University of Florida, who led the research, said it was surprising that even after decades of observing the Milky Way, "we're still finding these big monsters out there." The findings have been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal. The brightest star known until now is one called the Pistol Star, 5 million to 6 million times as bright as the sun. The brightness of a star, or its power output, is proportional to the cube of its mass; a star 10 times the mass of the sun would be 1,000 times as bright, and a star 100 times the mass would be 1 million times as bright. LBV 1806-20, despite its brightness, is not easily seen. Forty-five thousand light-years away on the other side of the Milky Way galaxy, it is blocked from view by dust clouds. But about 10 percent of its infrared light does make it to Earth. When LBV 1806-20 was discovered in the 1990s, astronomers categorized it as a bright, short-lived blue star and estimated that it was at least a million times the mass of the sun. But with new observations from the Palomar Observatory in California and the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, the astronomers produced better images and new estimates of the mass and brightness. Because the star is so bright, it will burn out quickly, within a couple of million years, compared with the 5 billion expected for the sun. Eikenberry said the high-resolution images ruled out the possibility that had fooled astronomers previously into erroneous claims, that the supposed supermassive star was actually a cluster of smaller ones. Still, he said it might be a binary or triple-star system. If it is a single star, it probably did not form in the usual way: a cloud of hydrogen gas collapsing under gravity, heating up and turning on when the hydrogen begins fusing into helium. But calculations indicate that other stars should be at most 120 times as massive as the sun, because heat and radiation from the collapsing cloud would blow away any additional gas. A clue to LBV 1806-20's history can be found in its neighbors, Eikenberry said. Nearby are other stars that, while not quite reaching LBV 1806-20's girth, are still very large; there are also a proto-star and a neutron star, the burned-out core of a star that exploded in a supernova. "Nothing like this has ever been seen before," Eikenberry said. Perhaps when the star exploded, the shock wave caused nearby gas clouds to collapse and form the large stars, including LBV 1806-20, he said. When these stars exhaust their hydrogen fuel in a few million years, they too will explode in a succession of supernovas, he went on, "like a fireworks display." http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/nation/2347363
What if planets were this big? Or you know, even as big as the sun. Can you imagine sitting on a plane to go to some country on the other side. That would SUCK.
That's seriously amazing! So does that mean the theories proposed on how stars formed have to be revised once again? Or are these "giants" rare enough to think they are just flukes in the universe? And if a star is that big, could it possibly hold a solar system thousands of times larger in radius than ours? Astronomy's great...
