Biggest star is ripping itself apart
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The biggest known star in the cosmos is in its death throes and will eventually explode, astronomers said yesterday.
Using a telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile, the astronomers said they had spotted telltale signs in the star called W26. Located about 16,000 light years away in the constellation of Ara, or The Altar, the star has a diameter 3,000 times that of the Sun.
W26, first observed in 1998, is a “red supergiant,” a term for a star that is as big as it is short-lived. Stars of this kind typically have lifetimes of less than a few million years before they exhaust their nuclear fuel and explode as supernova.
W26 is becoming unstable and shedding its outer layers, a key step in the death process, according to Britain’s Royal Astronomical Society.
The observations suggest “W26 is coming towards the end of its life and will eventually explode as a supernova.”
W26 is located in a star cluster called Westerlund 1, home to hundreds of thousands of stars. It is the most massive stellar group the Milky Way.
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