RMC 136a1: The Most Massive Star in the Universe

SPACE — The Sun is the most massive object in the solar system containing 99.8 percent of the mass of the entire Solar System. However, on a stellar scale, the sun is actually quite average.

About half of all known stars are more massive or heavier than the sun. Meanwhile, about half have less mass.

At the upper end of the scale, the largest known star in the sky is R136a1, a star more than 300 times more massive than our sun. This star is not alone in outperforming the dominant stars on Earth.

What is RMC 136a1?
RMC 136a1, usually abbreviated as R136a1. This star is located about 163,000 light years from Earth in the Tarantula Nebula. This massive star is outside our galaxy. RMC 136a1 is part of the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies.

Astronomers working at the Radcliffe Observatory in South Africa first identified the star cluster in 1960, and named it RMC 136. When the Hubble Space Telescope examined the system, it was discovered that the cluster consisted of more than 200 very bright stars. The most massive star is named RMC 136a1.

R136a1 has an estimated mass of 315 solar masses. Initially, when this star was discovered it was estimated to have around 265 solar masses. However, further observations in 2016 with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope refined the original measurement to 315 solar times.

“Unlike humans, these stars are born heavy and lose weight as they age,” Paul Crowther, a researcher at the University of Sheffield in England, told Space.com in 2010.

At just over a million years old, the extreme star R136a1 is already ‘middle age’. This star has undergone an intense mass loss. Although R136a1 is the most massive star known, it is by no means the largest star.

This star only stretches about 30 times the radius of the sun. The largest known star is UY Scuti. It is a hyper-giant star with a radius about 1,700 times larger than the sun. However, its mass is only 30 times that of the sun.

2024-01-19 02:03:00
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