Monster Stars in the Tarantula Nebula

How big can stars get? The cluster R136 in the Tarantula Nebula has long been known to harbor massive stars.

It contains hundreds of blue stars, some of them quite huge. The whole cluster can be observed with the high spatial resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope because the object is 170,000 light years away.

A handful of massive stellar members of this cluster have been studied extensively with imaging and also spectroscopy for diagnostics. Find out how big stars can get!