Huge star could outshine the sun

A UK-led team, guided by Professor Paul Crowther, have made the discovery, saying the sun is considered minute near the blue R136a1 star.

The discovery was made during the study of two clusters of stars in a galaxy next to the solar system, called the Large Magellanic Cloud, using a large telescope of the European Southern Observatory and Nasa’s Hubble space telescope.

According to the study, if the astronomical star replaced the sun in our galaxy, it would outshine it as the sun outshone the moon, reducing the Earth’s year to a mere three weeks.

The scientists said that stars shed weight throughout their life, believing that this “middle-aged star” has shed around a fifth of its weight, but is still staggeringly huge.

The scientific findings are published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.