The biggest star that has ever been discovered in the universe is reportedly dying. At about 15 hundred times wider than the sun in our solar system, the red supergiant star, called W26, is getting close to the end of its cycle, which will conclude with a resulting supernova.
The biggest star that has ever been discovered in the universe is reportedly dying.
At about 15 hundred times wider than the sun in our solar system, the red supergiant star, called W26, is getting close to the end of its cycle, which will conclude with it becoming a supernova, exploding and scattering itself into the universe.
Massive stars have short life cycles compared to smaller ones.
Researchers noticed something unusual while observing W26 using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile.
There is a cloud of hydrogen gas surrounding the star, making it the first ionized nebula observed around a red supergiant.
Royal Astronomical Society officials in the United Kingdom said: “the astronomers speculate that the source of the ionizing radiation may be either hot blue stars elsewhere in the cluster, or possibly a fainter, but much hotter, companion star to W26. The fact that the nebula is ionized will make it considerably easier to study in the future than if it were not ionized.”
W26 is part of a cluster of hundreds of thousands of stars called Westerlund 1 that is nearly 16 thousand light years from Earth.
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