Located about an hour south of downtown Houston in Brazos Bend State Park, the George Observatory can be a haul, but that doesn't stop people turning out for the observatory's open Saturdays.
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We get a lot of interest and I think there is a lot of interest in astronomy. "People could ask astronomers a question. "I think any new discovery in astrology brings people to the observatory because we give lectures on Saturday night to the public on various aspects of astronomy," Wilson says. Will this new discovery bring newcomers to the field? It will be pretty cool if it turns out to be real." They haven't weighed it with the normal method of weighing a star. But every discovery is open to scrutiny, every hypothesis is open to scrutiny.
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"Anytime that you say you found the most massive star known, it's really a neat thing. How big of a deal is this possible new discovery? And it's a very crowded star field. The University of Arizona cautioned that the star's weight had been inferred using scientific models and that those were subject to change." "Tarantula Nebula is a star forming region, visible in the Southern Hemisphere. "I have no way of knowing until I receive more data," Wilson says. Mark Krumholz, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz told the NY Daily News that "What they're characterizing as a single massive star could in fact be a binary system too close to be resolved."ĬultureMap asked the Houston Museum of Natural Science's George Observatory staff astronomer, Barbara Wilson, whether she agrees with the new discovery. Some scientists believe that R136a1 is actually two stars that overlap one another from the telescope's perspective, giving scientists the reason to belive that it is one gigantic star. Of course with any scientific discovery there will be haters. It's considered to be a bigger than a blue dwarf and a yellow dwarf, which is generally considered what the sun is. Located in Chile, Very Large Telescope (aka the biggest eye in the sky) was outfitted with highly advanced infrared technology that allowed the scientist to locate R136a1 in the Tarantula Nebula.
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Much like the name of the telescope, the name of the star is pretty uninspired - R136a1. The Very Large Telescope - which is the official name of the scientific instrument, only solidifying scientists' creativity or lack thereof - discovered the star around 165,000 light years away from earth's Milky Way. Crowther recently discovered (he thinks) the universe's largest star using a very large telescope. The sun is officially lame thanks to astrophysicist Paul Crowther from the University of Sheffield in northern England.