Scientists Discover a Star 200000 degrees Hotter than the Sun

 

the constellation sagittarius holds a hot and luminous celestial rarity that puts the sun's soaring temperatures to shame the giant burning furnace is quickly nearing its death and is headed towards a cataclysmic supernova explosion in a few thousand years and the violent radiation threatens to scorch anything in its surrounding rare intense and short-lived the star is truly one of a kind welcome

 to Science Reads and today we'll be taking a look at the most outrageously hot known star in the universe wr 102 evolution of a star when you look into the night sky the stars we see are like shiny ornaments adorning a big black backdrop as beautiful as they are these stars are actually constantly burning and fuse elements like hydrogen to get helium making them extremely hot and giving them a luminous glow the main source of their energy is the nuclear reactions taking place deep inside the core of the stars with elements like lithium oxygen carbon and hydrogen being a part of the process at higher temperatures as a result of these nuclear reactions elements like magnesium phosphorus and sulfur are also given out they have very high charges and therefore require more energy as they repel each other very strongly more new energy is then needed to push back against their resistance stars burn very bright and eventually die out some may take years to do so while some meet a very sudden explosive end take a main sequence star for example when the star finally burns all of its hydrogen fuel it will swell up to become a red giant after the puffing up of the outer layers the star will begin to collapse and ultimately form a dense white dwarf a white dwarf is said to be so dense that even a teaspoon full of its matter would weigh as much as an elephant on earth or five and a half tons but there are some stars in the universe much larger than our sun that don't really follow the same pattern they tend to lose their mass very very quickly when these stars ultimately run out of the elements that they confuse the star is forced to cool down and the immense pressure within the star ceases and gravity proves to be the ultimate winner and causes it to collapse onto itself and if there's still sufficient mass left the star would then turn into a black hole but massive supergiant stars end up shedding their mass in record time and combined with the pressure explode into a supernova these supermassive stars the candidates for the final pre-supernova stage are called Wolf Reyette stars

 the rare hot giants Wolf Reyette at galaxies are a rather rare population of galaxies that are known to host living high mass stars what really makes this galaxy so special is its highly unusual number of giant shimmering and brightly burning stars called the wolf ray at stars these stars represent the final burst of activity before the star begins to die when it comes to size it's safe to say they are nothing less than stellar behemoths with the stars being on average 20 times more massive than the sun one of their peculiar features is the fact that they shed their surplus mass as quickly as they possibly can as if they cannot wait to be rid of it while blasting substantial gusts of particles into space thus causing them to dwindle at an alarming rate named after the french astronomers Charles Wolf and George Reyette who discovered them in 1867 these types of stars can lose the

 entire mass of our sun in just about

 100 000 years not only are they massive but they are also known for being incredibly hot they boast of surface temperatures that are 10 to 40 times that of the sun the average temperature of a wolf Wolf Reyette type star is greater than 25,000 kelvin and has been said that the powerful winds that are emitted by these burning heated objects are driven by intense radiation pressure wool frayed stars shine several

 million times brighter than the sun

 almost like bright led bulbs in space given their scorching temperatures in large size the downside of this though is that because they burn so bright and big they do tend to die out very quickly so while the sun is busy turning hydrogen into helium these stars are plowing through the elements like oxygen just to try and keep equilibrium the stars live comparatively short and intense lives which makes them so rare to find except in the wolfray galaxy of course in fact most of the biggest and brightest stars in our milky way are Wolf Reyette type stars no surprise there further Wolf Reyette type stars are divided into two major subtypes wn with lines of helium and nitrogen ions that can be seen wc which contain lines of carbon and oxygen in addition to helium ions a minor subtype wo containing strong ovi lines has been recently discovered the hottest known star wr 102 belongs to the spectral category wo2 with soaring temperatures that will

 make you sweat just thinking about it

 too hot to handle lying in the constellation sagittarius wr 102 was first thought to be an optical counterpart to an odd x-ray source gx3 plus one upon further studying this bright oddity it soon became clear that it was a completely separate object in 1971 it was given the status of a luminous star and was noted to have ovi emission lines in its spectrum that were not very casual initially it became classified as a wc star after concluding that it wasn't the central star of a planetary nebula but it still remained rather unusual owing to its highly ionized emission lines it varied in its brightness and was given the variable star designation v389 Sagittarii but it wasn't the only one and soon in 1982 a set of five highly luminous stars were discovered bearing similar highly ionized emission lines of wr-102 these highly evolved massive stars along with wr 102 were then used to identify

 the wo class of Wolf Reyette type stars

 opening a new avenue of study for scientists and astronomers to put it plainly wo type Wolf Reyette stars are very similar to the wc type with very substantial amounts of oxygen as for now there are only six known oxygen sequence Wolf Reyette type stars in the universe and wr102 is the hottest of them all with a scorching surface temperature of 210 000 kelvin wr-102 has certainly set some new records for all the burning objects in space to put that into perspective for you the surface temperature of the sun is around 5 800 kelvin making the wr-102 star more than 200 000 degrees hotter the next time you think it's getting too hot just be glad our planet is not anywhere near wr-102 stars follow a fairly simple formula that can be understood as the more the mass of the star the brighter it becomes the colder stars are typically more red while the hotter ones have a bluish color to them the hot star therefore appears to have a bluish color since wr-102 as a wolf ray at star doesn't follow the usual path to becoming a red giant its outer hydrogen layers get blown apart and leave behind the more heavier elements with strongly ionized atoms of carbon oxygen as well as nitrogen it shines brilliantly in the sky and makes it the hottest star ever discovered when compared to the other famous giant stars like the great betelgeuse in the constellation Orion it is much cooler at 3646 kelvin

 and can be seen with a red hue on the other hand the brightest star in the universe Sirius or the dog star has a slight blue tinge and comes in at 9940 kelvin still lagging far behind at wr-102 wr-102 is one of three wolf freya stars that have a temperature of 200 000 kelvin or more the other being wr 142 in Cygnus and lmc 195-1 in the large Magellanic Cloud nevertheless the title for the hottest known star in the universe has been rightfully claimed by wr 102 supernova in the making with soaring temperatures stars quickly begin running out of fuel which in turn causes the star to start cooling down this brings the pressure down drastically and ultimately gravity wins out and the star is faced with a sudden collapse just imagine a gigantic object that's equal to a million times the mass of our earth collapsing within mere seconds ultimately the shock waves from the collapse result in a violent explosion of the outer layers of the star and that very explosion is what we know as a supernova scientists are estimating that in the next 1500 years wr-102 will explode into a supernova when it comes to stars this is the next big step and looks like our favorite hot star is in for a promotion since Wolf Reyette type stars represent the last evolutionary stage of any massive star before they shed their outer layers and eventually explode into supernovae and we can clearly see that wr102 is already well on its way to a cataclysmic explosion it's likely that the star is in the final stages of nuclear fusion and drawing closer to the end of the helium burning stage with the fact that the star is thousands of light years away from planet earth it's highly likely that wr 102 has already been bumped up to supernova status which we will only have evidence of years and years later perhaps it's a good thing that we are light years away and out of reach so that we won't be harmed by the possible gamma-ray burst or grb that is a result of high mass and rapid rotation during a stellar collapse we'd sure appreciate not being burned to a crisp by the radiation supernovas outshine all the other stars in the galaxy for a short while before ultimately fading the remnant of the massive star which went supernova is a neutron star which is among the densest and brightest objects in the universe now scientists have their attention on wr-102 not just because of its exceptionally fiery temperatures and rapid loss of mass but because it is a great candidate to go supernova in the near future at least that we know of one thing is for certain wr-102 has

 a very bright future ahead of it

 so what do you think will wr 102 be the next big supernova or supermassive black hole let us know in the comments below please like and share the article and don't forget to subscribe to the channel for more articles like this thanks for reading and see you next time