Every Star Just Discovered Explained In 17 Minutes

R136a1 The most massive star known sits at a distance that makes its existence difficult to fully grasp. It lies about 160,000 light years away in the Tarantula Nebula, a stellar nursery inside the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small companion galaxy orbiting the Milky Way. It is a Wolf-Rayet star, a type so hot and so violent that it is steadily blasting its own outer layers into space through a dense, high-speed wind. Estimates of its mass have shifted repeatedly as instruments improved, ranging from over 300 times the mass of the Sun in earlier measurements down to somewhere between 170 and 230 times in the sharpest images taken to date. Even at the lower figure, it holds the record. Its surface burns at roughly 46,000 Kelvin, about eight times hotter than the Sun, and it radiates several million times more energy. It pours out more light in four seconds than the Sun produces in an entire year.