It is a known fact that the sun is a massive presence in space, with a mass equivalent to 333,060 Earths.
It turns out even bigger suns exist in the universe. Astronomers recently spotted nine stars that are 100 more massive than the sun, and they were aptly called "monster stars."
Using the unique ultraviolet capabilities of the Hubble Space Telescope jointly operated by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the European Space Agency (ESA), an international team of astronomers was able to identify these "monster stars" in the star cluster R136.
The star cluster R136 is said to be located about 170,000 light-years away, particularly in the Tarantula Nebula within the Large Magellanic Cloud.
"The ability to distinguish ultraviolet light from such an exceptionally crowded region into its component parts, resolving the signatures of individual stars, was only made possible with the instruments aboard Hubble," lead study author Paul Crowther from the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom said in an article posted onSpaceTelescope.com.
According to the same article, these new discoveries, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, yields "the largest sample of very massive stars identified to date."
Aside from being humongous, these recently detected monster stars are also extremely bright, with brightness that can outshine the Sun by a factor of 30 million if they are taken together.
The astronomers were also able to observe how these monster stars eject "an Earth mass of material per month at a speed approaching one percent of the speed of light, resulting in extreme weight loss throughout their brief lives," according to SpaceTelescope.com.
Although these newly discovered "monster stars" are really gigantic, the star called R136a1 remains the biggest known to scientists, at over 250 solar masses.
