What is the heaviest star ever discovered? Can a star be heavier than a black hole?

 Weighing in at roughly 200 times the mass of our Sun, R136a1 isn't just the heaviest star ever discovered—it actually outweighs most black holes in our galaxy.

Located about 160,000 light-years away in a densely packed star cluster within the Large Magellanic Cloud, this colossal object pushes the limits of how large a star can physically grow. While current astronomical models place its mass between 170 and 233 solar masses, it was likely closer to 300 solar masses when it first ignited.

Massive stars like R136a1 live violently and briefly. They burn through their nuclear fuel at a furious rate, shining millions of times brighter than the Sun. The sheer physical scale of R136a1 makes even large main-sequence stars look insignificant by comparison.

A size comparison between a small red dwarf, the Sun, a larger B-type main sequence star, and the massive R136a1. Photo by ESO/M. Kornmesser is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

This immense bulk is exactly why it is heavier than a typical black hole. Black holes are not universally massive; their weight depends entirely on how they formed. When a dying star collapses, it leaves behind a stellar-mass black hole that typically ranges from just 5 to 100 solar masses, well below R136a1's current weight.

However, a star cannot compete with the universe's true heavyweights. Intermediate-mass black holes scale from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of solar masses, and supermassive black holes weigh millions or billions of times more than our Sun. When R136a1 eventually exhausts its fuel in a few million years, it will likely collapse directly into a black hole itself, leaving behind a remnant that weighs only a fraction of its current record-breaking mass.

The core of the Tarantula Nebula, showing the dense R136 star cluster where R136a1 is located. Photo by International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

What is the largest animal discovered most recently?

 Imagine you're aboard the Navy ship AFB-14 , sailing off the coast of Kaneohe, Hawaii. The date is November 15, 1976. The anchors are about to be pulled aboard when you see something caught in the middle of the bright orange, parachute-like device.

It's a shark, and a pretty big one at that.

Meet the greatmouth shark ( Megachasma pelagios ). These fish can grow very large—though not as impressively large as, say, a whale shark or a basking shark.

Greatmouths can reach nearly 20 feet (about 6 meters) in length.

It's impressive that these alien-looking sharks have managed to remain hidden for so long. Most of the enormous deep-sea creatures such as sperm whales, oarfish, giant and colossal squid, etc., have long been known to scientists, albeit not very well. Carcasses have washed ashore, specimens have been caught in nets, and, in the case of the sperm whale, we've hunted them for thousands of years.

It's not even that largemouths are super-smart and sneaky. They're relatively slow swimmers, even in deeper waters, and mostly just drift through the water column, sifting plankton from the sea into their cavernous jaws. Their bodies are flaccid and fragile, so much so that sperm whales bounce them around, at least in one case. Sperm whales are a bit of a jerk. You'd expect such a weak swimmer to be washed ashore all the time, but no. As of 2018, fewer than 99 largemouths have been recorded, most of which are carcasses that washed ashore or got caught in nets.

Largemouths have been mistaken for small whales on numerous occasions. Given the vastness of their habitat, one has to wonder if they were perhaps the basis behind the legend of the Ningen . The Ningen is a popular cryptid as old as the internet, described as a pale, humanoid creature that is absolutely enormous.

Hmmm...

Ningen or not, largemouths are very, very large and, relatively speaking, only recently discovered.

What's the scariest thing archaeologists have ever discovered?

 When archaeologists opened the tomb of Liu He, the Haihun ruler of the Han Dynasty, they discovered a trove of money. This included 5,330,000 ancient copper coins, weighing approximately 10 tons, and 358 gold cakes.

A distant relative of the royal family, Liu He was emperor of the Han Dynasty for 27 days.

However, he couldn't do the job. He loved music and chess, but didn't really know how to be an emperor.

Unsurprisingly, he was quickly overthrown, and moved south with his treasures.

He died in his 30s from eating too much cantaloupe.

What is a possible explanation for Punctum, the newly discovered space object?

 

Punctum might be a brand new mysterious astronomical object that has never been observed before

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We discovered it with the ALMA radiotelescope, which was observing the active galactic nucleus of the nearby galaxy NGC 4945, 11 million light-years away, shown above. This enigmatic pointy source of millimeter-range highly polarized electromagnetic radiation was discovered by accident because it showed in the field of view.

We don’t know what it is, but it must be very small to emit radiation that is polarized, which is usually produced by objects with a very strong magnetic field, like magnetars. Except that this one emits radiation four to five orders of magnitude more powerfully than any known magnetar (10,000 to 100,000 times) and even 10 to 100 times stronger than supernovas.

It’s not a transient source of radiation like these powerful explosions because it has been continuously observed since 2023. Furthermore, it’s not visible in visible light or other ranges of electromagnetic radiation.

We can only guess what it is. Maybe it’s a very powerful magnetar that is located in an unusual environment that made it so powerful. This signal cannot come from a remnant of a supernova because they are too large to emit such a powerful polarized radiation.

Perhaps if we find more of these mysterious Punctums elsewhere, we might finally figure out what it is.