Biggest Star Ever Found Will Explode in a Supernova; 1,500 Times Wider Than The Sun

The biggest star ever found is ripping apart.  The star is 1,500 times the size of the sun.

Scientists studying the ending phase of the largest star ever discovered shed light on how massive, dying stars seed the universe with  basic ingredients.

The star is a red supergiant star named W26. It is the largest known star in the universe. It is about 1,500 times wider than the sun. Researchers say the sat is nearing the end of its life and will eventually explode as a supernova.

in a statement officials with Great Britain's Royal Astronomical Society said "Stars with masses tens of times larger than that of the sun live very short and dramatic lives compared to their less massive siblings. Some of the most massive stars have lifetimes of less than a few million years before they exhaust their nuclear fuel and explode as supernovas. At the very ends of their lives these stars become highly unstable and eject a considerable amount of material from their outer envelopes."

Astronomers have been studying the largest star cluster in the Milky Way through the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope Survey Telescope, which is located in Chile.

The star cluster in the Milky Way galaxy, is  a group of hundreds of thousands of stars located about 16,000 light-years from Earth. The area is known as Westerlund 1.

The researchers studying W26, which lies noticed that the gigantic star in the center of Westerlund 1 is surrounded by a big, glowing cloud of hydrogen gas.

The Royal Astronomical Society says this is the first "ionized nebula" ever found around a red supergiant.

Royal Astronomical Society officials said "W26 itself would be too cool to make the gas glow; the astronomers speculate that the source of the ionizing radiation may be either hot blue stars elsewhere in the cluster, or possibly a fainter, but much hotter, companion star to W26. The fact that the nebula is ionized will make it considerably easier to study in the future than if it were not ionized."