CLOSE PHOTOS

Isolating the light of the biggest stars is a difficult and tedious process. Massive stars are rare, distant, short-lived and crammed inside dense clusters that are shrouded in dust. In the past, reports of stars up to 2,000 times the size of the sun all turned out to be clusters of stars, not single, massive objects.”People have been trying to find the most massive star and to determine the upper mass limit of stars, but it’s like prospecting for gold. You have to sift through a whole lot of junk and there’s also a lot of fool’s gold,” said Rochester Institute of Technology astronomer Donald Figer.THE GIST
A star more than 300 times more massive than the sun was detected about 22,000 light-years away. That size is twice as big as previously known stars. Previous claims of stars more than 150 times the mass of the sun have turned out to be clusters. Get big, die young. Such is the fate of behemoth stars, the largest of which are about 150 times the mass of the sun. A new study, however, finds evidence for stars more than twice that size, including an uber-giant so luminous that it makes the light of our sun look no brighter than the glow of the full moon in comparison.