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A Really, Really Big Star

An astronomer makes a humongous discovery. Will it hold up?

By Charles Petit

Posted 10/12/97

Don Figer is a young University of California astronomer with a yen for monster stars. Last week, it appears, he found one. It may be the mightiest star ever discovered, blazing furiously inside a shroud of dust very near the Milky Way's core. Detected in images gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope for Figer's UC--Los Angeles team, it was dubbed the Pistol Star after the shape of its embracing gas cloud and shines with a power from 2 million to 15 million times that of our sun.

The sheer stupendousness of the star's mass pushed the bounds of normal astrophysics. And inevitably, other astronomers pushed back, demanding more data before believing Figer's claim. One reason for their uncertainty is the swiftness with which the Pistol Star burst onto the scientific stage. NASA, operator of the seven-year-old, $1.5 billion space telescope, eagerly released the image October 8, less than a month after the star's light bounced off the Hubble's 94-inch mirror and before other astronomers had seen the detailed measurements.

For the space agency, the discovery is evidence of continuing scientific dividends from the orbiting observatory, which received an upgrade last February during an $800 million shuttle mission. Shuttle astronauts gave the telescope a key new instrument called NICMOS (for Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer) that can see at frequencies--essentially, heat waves--piercing dust and gas. These cloudy barriers absorb ordinary light and make the giant Pistol Star invisible to most of today's ground-based telescopes. Some 25,000 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, the star is nearly buried in murk 100 light-years from the center of the Milky Way, whose 200 billion stars are spread across 100,000 light-years of space.

Figer and his colleagues estimate the Pistol Star's mass today at 100 times that of the sun. If this is so, it must have an immense girth. Were the star to appear suddenly at the center of the solar system, its outer atmosphere would stretch beyond the 93-million-mile orbit of the Earth.

Figer was not greatly surprised by the data. "I was actually hoping to search for these kinds of stars in the center of our galaxy, and now, thank goodness, I found one," said the 31-year-old research astronomer. The discovery provides a dramatic flourish to a quest Figer began four years ago in his doctoral thesis. He then speculated that certain glowing knots of gas near the galactic core might conceal immense, young stars. The Pistol Nebula was a clear candidate. Debates over its size and nature may continue for some time.

Blown away. As an embryonic star contracts from a cloud of gas and lights thermonuclear fires by fusing hydrogen and other light elements into heavier ones, energy pours into space as X-ray, light, radio, and other emissions. At some point, calculated at about 120 solar masses, "the light and radiation get so intense, stuff falling toward the star just gets blown away. It can't grow anymore," says Roberta Humphreys of the University of Minnesota, an authority on high-mass stars.

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