ASTRONOMY Roughly 165,000 light-years away, the brightest and largest known star is shining in the Tarantula nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy neighboring the Milky Way. R136a1 was about 320 times as massive as the sun when it formed a little over a million years ago.

Researchers, led by Paul Crowther, an astrophysicist at the University of Sheffield in England, used the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, combined with data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, to study the star. Such massive stars live hard and die young.

This giant today is about 10 million times as luminous as the sun and has lost about a fifth of its mass over its lifetime. Its current mass is about 265 times that of the sun. Scientists now hope to find out how such extremely massive stars form, and they will also try to determine how they die. Smaller stars die as supernovas, leaving behind black holes or neutron stars. Researchers believe that stars as large as R136a1 may meet an even brighter and more violent end, leaving little evidence of their existence.