Scientists discover heaviest star in universe branded 'almost too big to exist'
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Astronomers have discovered the heaviest star known to exist in the universe, thought to be more than double the weight of the sun.
Situated about 4,600 light years away and a colossal 330,000 times the mass of Earth, the ‘neutron’ star was formed from the remains of a supernova, when a dying giant star collapses.
But J0740+6620, as it has been named by scientists, measures just 15 miles across - making the sheer scale of its compressed weight difficult to grasp.
It means the rapidly spinning star, uncovered at Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, is on the verge of crushing and being swallowed by a black hole.
The team of US astronomers that uncovered it, publishing their findings in the Nature Astronomy Journal, hailed it “the most massive neutron star ever detected - almost too massive to exist".
To visualise its size, they say extracting just one sugar cube’s worth of a neutron star would weigh 100 million tonnes on Earth, or the entire human population.
Maura McLaughlin, a lead author in the study, said: "These stars are very exotic. We don't know what they're made of and one really important question is, 'How massive can you make one of these stars?'
“It has implications for very exotic material that we simply can't create in a laboratory on Earth."
Researchers measured the star using the Shapiro Delay, where a time difference in radio waves reaching Earth as the white dwarf passes in front of the pulsar converts into a calculation of mass.
