R136c is a star located in

R136 R136 (formerly known as RMC 136 from the Radcliffe Observatory Magellanic Clouds catalogue) is the central concentration of stars in the NGC 2070 star cluster, which lies at the centre of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud. When ...

, a tight knot of stars at the centre of

NGC 2070 NGC 2070 (also known as Caldwell 103) is a large open cluster and candidate super star cluster forming the heart of the bright region in the centre-south-east of the Large Magellanic Cloud. It is at the centre of the Tarantula Nebula and produce ...

, an

open cluster An open cluster is a type of star cluster made of up to a few thousand stars that were formed from the same giant molecular cloud and have roughly the same age. More than 1,100 open clusters have been discovered within the Milky Way galaxy, and ...

weighing 450,000

solar masses The solar mass () is a standard unit of mass in astronomy, equal to approximately . It is often used to indicate the masses of other stars, as well as stellar clusters, nebulae, galaxies and black holes. It is approximately equal to the mass of ...

and containing 10,000 stars. At and 3.8 million , it is the one of the

most massive stars This is a list of the most massive stars that have been discovered, in solar masses (). Uncertainties and caveats Most of the masses listed below are contested and, being the subject of current research, remain under review and subject to consta ...

known and one of the most luminous, along with being one of the hottest, at over . It was first resolved and named by Feitzinger in 1980, along with R136a and R136b.

Description

R136c is a

Wolf–Rayet star Wolf–Rayet stars, often abbreviated as WR stars, are a rare heterogeneous set of stars with unusual spectra showing prominent broad emission lines of ionised helium and highly ionised nitrogen or carbon. The spectra indicate very high surface ...

of the spectral type WN5h and with a temperature of , making it one of hottest stars known. It is the one of the most massive stars known, with a mass of , and it is one of

most luminous stars This is a list of stars arranged by their absolute magnitude – their intrinsic stellar luminosity. This cannot be observed directly, so instead must be calculated from the apparent magnitude (the brightness as seen from Earth), the distance t ...

known, with a luminosity of 3.8 million . The extreme luminosity is produced by the CNO fusion process in its highly compressed hot core. Typical of all Wolf–Rayet stars, R136c has been losing mass by means of a strong

stellar wind A stellar wind is a flow of gas ejected from the upper atmosphere of a star. It is distinguished from the bipolar outflows characteristic of young stars by being less collimated, although stellar winds are not generally spherically symmetric. D ...

with speeds over and mass loss rates in excess of solar masses per year. It is strongly suspected to be a binary, due to the detection of hard x-ray emission typical of colliding wind binaries, but the companion is thought to make only a small contribution to the total luminosity.

Evolution

R136c is so energetic that it has already lost a substantial fraction of its initial mass, even though it is only a few million years old. It is still effectively on the

main sequence In astronomy, the main sequence is a continuous and distinctive band of stars that appears on plots of stellar color versus brightness. These color-magnitude plots are known as Hertzsprung–Russell diagrams after their co-developers, Ejnar Her ...

, fusing hydrogen at its core via the

CNO cycle The CNO cycle (for carbon–nitrogen–oxygen; sometimes called Bethe–Weizsäcker cycle after Hans Albrecht Bethe and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker) is one of the two known sets of fusion reactions by which stars convert hydrogen to helium, ...

, but it has convected and mixed fusion products to the surface and these create a powerful

and emission spectrum normally only seen in highly evolved stars. Its fate depends on the amount of mass it loses before its core collapses, but is likely to result in a

supernova A supernova is a powerful and luminous explosion of a star. It has the plural form supernovae or supernovas, and is abbreviated SN or SNe. This transient astronomical event occurs during the last evolutionary stages of a massive star or when ...

. The most recent models for single star evolution at near-solar metallicities suggest that the most massive stars explode as highly stripped type Ic supernovae, although different outcomes are possible for binaries. Some of these supernovae are expected to produce a type of

gamma-ray burst In gamma-ray astronomy, gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are immensely energetic explosions that have been observed in distant galaxies. They are the most energetic and luminous electromagnetic events since the Big Bang. Bursts can last from ten milli ...

and the expected remnant is a

black hole A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravitation, gravity is so strong that nothing, including light or other Electromagnetic radiation, electromagnetic waves, has enough energy to escape it. The theory of general relativity predicts t ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:R136c Stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud Tarantula Nebula Wolf–Rayet stars Extragalactic stars ? Dorado (constellation) Large Magellanic Cloud