W26- the Largest Star Ever Discovered is Ripping Itself Apart, Astronomers Say

A team of international scientists has found a huge dying star that is throwing off its outer layers.

Astronomers from the U.K., Germany, Chile and the U.S. observed the supergiant star 'W26', which they believe is the largest star in the known Universe. The star is on its death throes and has become highly unstable.  

Large stars live for a short span of time but, have more dramatic lives when compared to average-sized stars. Some of these huge stars live for less than a few million years before they could exhaust the nuclear fuel within them and finally explode into supernovae. As they reach the last phase of their lives, they get extremely unstable and emit excess amount of material from the outer layers.  These emitted materials contain necessary elements that are needed for the formation of rocky planets.

The astronomers surveyed our Galaxy and spotted the superstar cluster Westerlund 1 with the help of Very Large Telescope Survey Telescope (VST) at the European Southern Observatory's Paranal Observatory in Chile.

Westerlund 1 is located in the southern constellation of Ara (The Altar) about16,000 light years away from Earth

The Royal Academy of Sciences, said that analysis of Westerlund 1 images revealed a huge glowing cloud of ionized hydrogen gas surrounding the star W26.

Astronomers have rarely spotted such clouds around massive stars let alone red supergiant stars such as W26, according to a press release.

The astronomers claim that W26 is too cool to make the gas glow by itself. They say the source of the ionizing radiation could either be the nearby hot blue stars or a fainter and much hotter companion star of W26.

W26 is the largest star ever discovered and has a radius that's 1500 times larger than the Sun. Researchers also noticed that the nebula surrounding W26 is similar to the nebula surrounding SN1987A- the remnant of the star that exploded as a supernova in 1987.