SUPERMASSIVE stars: fact or fiction?

From the creator

Have you ever looked up at the night sky and wondered how massive can stars be? Or what is the biggest star out there? Is there even a limit to how massive they can be? Well we can try and answer this question in two ways - first with theory, with our understanding of how stars fuel themselves with nuclear fusion fusing hydrogen into helium to produce energy which can counteract gravity and how that all contributes. And then secondly by surveying the stars we can see in the sky, counting how many of each mass we see to work out if there is an obvious cut off in mass that we see. And when we do that we get a distribution of that drops off towards 150 times heavier than the Sun, suggesting that is the limit. But is that just for stars forming now, what about stars in the early Universe when conditions were very different? Could they be much heavier? Could they be supermassive stars...? Abbott et al. (1981) - https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/1981ApJ...250..645A Bestenlehner et al. (2020) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.05136 Crowther et al. (2016) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.04994 De Becker et al. (2006) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0606379 Figer (2005) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0503193 Hosek et al. (2019) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1808.02577 Wang et al. (2024) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.04476 Zwick et al. (2025) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22014 My previous video on the history of figuring out the most massive star limit - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSQS

Published 2025-08-21 · Watch on YouTube ↗
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