How MASSIVE can a STAR get?

From the creator

Go to https://brilliant.org/drbecky to get a 30-day free trial and the first 200 people will get 20% off their annual subscription! We know there's a limit to how small a star can be, but is there a limit to how BIG stars can get? Is there some aspect of Physics that limits how big they can grow, or do big stars just get rarer and rarer so we're less likely to see them? The biggest star we've ever found is R136a1 at around 200 times heavier than the Sun, and that is very challenging for our models of star formation to explain... My previous video on the lower limit to the mass of stars - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-l5_RZvZ5VE Salpeter (1955; first analysis of the IMF) - https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/1955ApJ...121..161S Hopkins (2018; review on the IMF) - https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.09949 Larson & Starrfield (1971; the limit from models of star formation) - https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/1971A%26A....13..190L Nakano (1989; increasing the limit with models of star formation) - https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/1989ApJ...345..464N Jijina & Adams (1996; increasing the limit with models of star formation) - https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/1996ApJ...462..874J Feast, Thackery & Wesselink (1960; catalogue of stars in the Magellanic Clouds) - https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/121/4/337/2602312 Ebbets & Conti (1982; R136a1 is 2000 times the mass of the Sun?) - Bestenlehner et al. (2020; mass estimate of R136a1) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.0

Published 2023-10-05 · Watch on YouTube ↗
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