See How A Star Is Formed

The biggest stars in the galaxy take about 100,000 years to form, which is the blink of an eye in astronomical terms. (A smaller star like the sun takes millions of years to form.) So it is rare to find a star more than eight times the mass of the sun (big enough to supernova at the end of its life) while it is still forming, and astronomers led by the University of Cambridge just found one that is more than 30 times the mass of the sun, and still growing.

The forming star, or protostar, is about 11,000 light years away, in a much denser and more volatile region of the galaxy. This is another reason it can be hard to find young massive stars among the 100 billion stars in the Milky Way—they tend to form far away from our calm little galactic neighborhood.

The find represents an exciting opportunity to study one of the most massive stars in the galaxy while it begins its short and violent life. The researchers discovered that the star is forming from the center of a rotating disk of gas and dust, called an accretion disk, just like smaller stars such as the sun. However, the newly discovered star and its surrounding disk are so massive that it is possible that not only planets, but other stars will form within the accretion disk to ultimately orbit the bigger host star—a solar system of smaller solar systems.