Milky Way Star 500 Times the Size of Earth's Sun Offers Look into Formation Process

An international team of scientists has discovered the birth of the Milky Way Galaxy's largest star to date, according to a University of Manchester (UM) press release.

The team used Chile's Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescope, the largest of its kind. The team said the star is 500 times more massive than our sun and a lot more luminous.

Their study will be published in the upcoming issue of the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

"The remarkable observations from ALMA allowed us to get the first really in-depth look at what was going on within this cloud," said lead author Dr. Nicolas Peretto, from Cardiff University. "We wanted to see how monster stars form and grow, and we certainly achieved our aim. One of the sources we have found is an absolute giant - the largest proto-stellar core ever spotted in the Milky Way."

UM's Gary Fuller, co-author of the study, said the team was very fortunate to catch a star in such a young phase of its existence.

"Our observations reveal in superb detail the filamentary network of dust and gas flowing into the central compact region of the cloud and strongly support the theory of global collapse for the formation of massive stars," he said.

UM hosted the study with its Science and Technology Facilities Council-funded support center for UK astronomers who use the ALMA telescope. Peretto said the team did not use the massive telescope's full potential for their observations.

"ALMA will definitely revolutionize our knowledge of star formation, solving some current problems, and certainly raising new ones," he said.

Peretto also expressed how rare and uncommon it was to have witnessed the star's infancy.

"Even though we already believed that the region was a good candidate for being a massive star-forming cloud, we were not expecting to find such a massive embryonic star at its center," he said. "This cloud is expected to form at least one star 100 times more massive than the Sun and up to a million times brighter. Only about one in 10,000 of all the stars in the Milky Way reach that kind of mass."