Astronomers have discovered the heaviest star in the universe that, they say, is more than twice the mass of our sun. Amazingly, the star is only 15 miles across.
That makes the density and the weight of it so huge as to be almost unimaginable. It’s about 700,000 times heavier than Earth and is what’s known as a ‘neutron’ star – basically the compressed remains of a supernova.
It happens when a giant star collapses in on itself in a massive explosion. Despite bearing such an impressive title of ‘heaviest’ star in the known universe, it has a pretty uninspiring official name: J0740+6620.
According to the US team studying it, J0740+6620 is ‘the most massive neutron star ever detected — almost too massive to exist.’ The measurement approaches the limits of how compact a single object can be without crushing itself into a black hole. It was detected about 4,600 light-years from Earth by the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. One light-year is about six trillion miles.
Read more at metro.co.uk
