A Star That Packs Real Punch

The sun’s blinding glare would be but a glimmer next to the Pistol star, 10 million times brighter than our own star, yet from Earth we cannot see any hint of it.

The massive star--the biggest discovered so far--sits near the center of the Milky Way galaxy but is obscured by 25,000 light years of intervening interstellar dust. Pistol’s image has burst upon us, thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope’s newly installed infrared camera. UCLA astronomers Don F. Figer and Mark Morris headed the team that pursued and discovered the stellar giant after a ground-based infrared telescope had detected it in the early 1990s.

The scientists believe that Pistol, which they named after the shape of its surrounding gas cloud or nebula, may have been 200 times as massive as the sun when it came into being between 1 million and 3 million years ago, an infant compared with the sun’s estimated age of 5 billion years.

Pistol’s existence already challenges existing theories about the formation of stars. “Its formation and life stages will provide important tests for new theories about star birth and evolution,” Figer said.

Scientists expect that Pistol will explode in a supernova in another 1 million to 3 million years. We’ll have to take their word for it.