Oct 7 1997
From The Space Library
NASA announced that astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) had identified the most luminous star ever charted. The "celestial mammoth," large enough to fill the diameter of the Earth's orbit, reportedly releases up to 10 million times the power of the Sun. The team from the University of California at Los Angeles estimated that the star, possibly as old as 3 million years, weighs up to 200 times the mass of the Sun. The team nicknamed it the Pistol Star because it has a pistol-shaped nebula. Despite the star's mass and brightness, it was not visible to the naked eye because of the interstellar dust clouds between Earth and the center of the Milky Way. Therefore, astronomers had used infrared technology to observe the star. Team researcher Mark R. Morris argued that the discovery of the massive star near the center of the galaxy would force scientists to rethink their conceptions of how stars formed in the first place.
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