The Catholic University of Louvain, in collaboration with the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias and the University of La Laguna, leads the first Asteroseismological study of high mass stars, using NASA telescopes.
An international team of astronomers, led by researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of La Laguna (ULL), has found one of the most massive and luminous stars in our galaxy, behind a dense cloud of interstellar gas and dust. It is a supergiant, with a mass almost 50 times the mass of the Sun, with a radius almost 40 times the solar radius, and a luminosity approaching a million times that of our own star, and has been given the descriptor 2MASS J20395358+4222505. But its most disconcerting aspect for the researchers is a variation in its velocity of
Researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of La Laguna (ULL), publish today in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics the first results of a detailed study of nearly a thousand blue supergiants in the Milky Way. This is the biggest sample of stars of this type which has been studied until now. The study has used over 15 years of high quality observations taken mainly with the NOT and Mercator telescopes at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in La Palma. The analysis of these data will allow researchers to improve their knowledge of the evolution of
