Field of Science

Pages

Starburst Region Home To Milky Way's Most Massive Known Star

Several blue supergiant stars crowd into a volume of less than a cubic light-year, along with three so-called Wolf-Rayet stars — extremely bright and massive stars that are ejecting vast amounts of material before finishing off in glorious explosions known as supernovae. Using another recent set of observations performed with the SINFONI instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have confirmed that one of these stars is about 120 times more massive than our Sun, standing out as the most massive star known so far in the Milky Way -- Press Release

The starburst region NGC 3603.

This wide-field image, based on data from Digitized Sky Survey 2, shows the whole region around the cosmic factory NGC 3603, located 22 000 light-years away.Credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2