杏吧原创

A SUPERNOVA that burst onto the cosmic scene in April 2007 was probably the death throes of the most massive star yet discovered.

So say of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and his colleagues, who followed the afterglow of the explosion in a nearby dwarf galaxy over 18 months (Nature, ).

Their observations point to the explosion of a hypergiant star with a mass 200 times that of the sun. That would blow apart the idea that stars bigger than about 150 solar masses do not exist in our mature universe.

Gal-Yam thinks the conditions in the host galaxy could be like those in the early universe, when theory says such giant stars were born and died in great numbers, seeding the universe with heavy elements. 鈥淭hese galaxies could be fossil labs to teach us about the first stars,鈥� he says.