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Our brains aren’t built to comprehend this shit, but let’s try. You can fit one million Earths inside the sun. And yet? A recently discovered star is 300 times more massive than the sun.

via io9:

Astronomers have identified the most massive stars known. These objects are millions of times brighter than our Sun and the largest of them all is a whoppin’ 300 times the mass of our favorite star.

The stars were discovered in two clusters–NGC 3603 and RMC 136a–and researchers used a “combination of instruments on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, in addition to archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope, to study the stellar nurseries.” With this combination of tools, they were able to discover some almost scary details about R136a1, the most massive of the stars:

Its current mass is approximately 265 solar masses, and its estimated birth weight was as much as 320 times that of our sun. R136a1 also has the highest luminosity of any star found to date — nearly 10 million times greater than the sun.

Good lord. I can’t even begin to imagine that shit. This thing needs a way cooler name than R136a1, though.

Some fucking phenomenal shit right here. Welcome to outer-space, the greatest example of staggering relativity:

via new scientist:

A relatively small black hole has been spotted blowing bubbles with diameters of more than 300-1500 light years.

Robert Soria of the University College London and colleagues pored over images and data from the European Southern Observatory and Chandra X-ray Observatory, zeroing in on an unusually large remnant from a supernova explosion. Its host galaxy appears in the Sculptor constellation of Earth’s southern sky, around 12.7 million light years away.

They discovered three hot spots in the x-ray emissions, all in a row, and identified the central one as the core of a black hole a few times larger than the sun. The two spots flanking the core are produced by jets colliding with interstellar gas.

A nearby star feeds the black hole, giving it energy to shoot a flood of particles out each side at near the speed of light. These jets are much more powerful than expected for a black hole of this size, blowing bubbles that expand faster than the speed of sound. The finding suggests that more of the energy spent by a black hole goes into accelerating matter – rather than emitting x-rays – than previously supposed.

DIAMETERS OF 300-1500 LIGHT YEARS.

WHAT THE FUCK.

The universe is great.