“Hubble” has received photos of the greatest stars of the Galaxy
MOSCOW, March 6 — RIA Novosti. Orbital Observatory “Hubble” received the photos of the star Westerlund 1-26, the greatest stars of the milky Way in the constellation of the Altar, which occupies slightly more space than the Solar system to the orbit of Jupiter, the website of the space telescope.
The star, as they say scientists, is inside a large superscope Westerlund 1 — family of several thousand very young and unusually large stars, whose average age is only 4-5 million years.
In this “star family” is home to several large yellow hypergiants, red supergiants, and several dozen unusually active “hairy” stars wolf-Rayet and many “normal” giants, whose mass is ten times higher than the sun.
Despite the youth of the cluster, many stars in it have already reached the advanced years of your life or have already graduated from its existence as large stars live very short time — tens or even units of millions of years. Bright representative of this class of “old giants” is the largest star clusters of red supergiant Westerlund 1-26.
This star has a really impressive size – it is 330 thousand times brighter than the Sun and more of it in 1,5 thousand times
Its mass is extremely difficult to establish because of the great activity of the star and low density of the outer shells, however, astronomers predict that it exceeds the sun a few dozen times.
She had removed from us at a relatively small distance — about 16 thousand light years, so the scientists were able to study in detail the properties of Westerlund 1-26 using “Hubble”, his ground-based colleagues VLT and other scientific instruments. If this accumulation is not closed from the clouds of dust and gas, Westerlund 1-26 and then her roommate would be the brightest stars in earth’s sky.
One of the major discoveries of recent years was the discovery that the giant throws in the environment a huge amount of matter, surrounding himself with a giant mass of burning hot plasma. Recent calculations of astrophysicists show that emissions Westerlund 1-26 has spread to a distance of about four light-years, forming the nebula is clearly visible to the telescopes.
Further observations of Westerlund 1-26 and other unusual stars in Westerlund 1, as scientists hope, will help to understand the role played by such large superscope in the formation and evolution of galaxies.