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Astronomers find enormous nuclear furnace in our Milky Way, a massive Hypergiant
With an estimated size of over 1,300 solar diameters, HR 5171 would be one of the 10 largest stars ever discovered and known to mankind
The star is so huge and bright that despite its large distance of 12,000 light years, it still shines with a magnitude of 6.40, thus making it almost visible to the naked eye in highly light unpolluted environments
Sky position: RA 13h 47.2m, Dec neg62° 35.4'
Common designations: HIP 67261, HD 119796, HR 5171
"ESO's Very Large Telescope has revealed the largest yellow star—and one of the 10 largest stars found so far. This hypergiant has been found to measure more than 1,300 times the diameter of the Sun, and to be part of a double star system, with the second component so close that it is in contact with the main star. Observations spanning over 60 years also indicate that this remarkable object is changing very rapidly.
Using ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), Olivier Chesneau (Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur, Nice, France) and an international team of collaborators have found that the yellow hypergiant star HR 5171 A is absolutely huge—1300 times the diameter of the Sun and much bigger than was expected. This makes it the largest yellow star known. It is also in the top ten of the largest stars known—50% larger than the famous red supergiant Betelgeuse—and about one million times brighter than the Sun."
Read more at:
http://phys.org/news/2014-03-largest-yellow-hypergiant-star.html#jCp
The paper: "The yellow hypergiant HR 5171 A: Resolving a massive interacting binary in the common envelope phase", by Chesneau et al., to appear in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
arxiv.org/pdf/1401.2628v2.pdf
Image: HR 5171, the brightest star just below the centre of this wide-field image, is a yellow hypergiant, a very rare type of stars with only a dozen known in our galaxy. Its size is over 1,300 times that of the Sun -- one of the 10 largest stars found so far. Observations with ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer have shown that it is actually a double star, with the companion in contact with the main star. Credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2
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