Go to https://brilliant.org/drbecky to get a 30day free trial and the first 200 people will get 20% off their annual subscription! We know there's a limit to how small a star can be, but is there a limit to how BIG stars can get? Is there some aspect of Physics that limits how big they can grow, or do big stars just get rarer and rarer so we're less likely to see them? The biggest star we've ever found is R136a1 at around 200 times heavier than the Sun, and that is very challenging for our models of star formation to explain...

My previous video on the lower limit to the mass of stars    • Planemos | When is a star actually a ...  

Salpeter (1955; first analysis of the IMF) https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/p...
Hopkins (2018; review on the IMF) https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.09949
Larson & Starrfield (1971; the limit from models of star formation) https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/p...
Nakano (1989; increasing the limit with models of star formation) https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/p...
Jijina & Adams (1996; increasing the limit with models of star formation) https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/p...
Feast, Thackery & Wesselink (1960; catalogue of stars in the Magellanic Clouds) https://academic.oup.com/mnras/articl...
Ebbets & Conti (1982; R136a1 is 2000 times the mass of the Sun?)
Bestenlehner et al. (2020; mass estimate of R136a1) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.05136.pdf
Kalari et al. (2002; new estimate of mass of R136a1) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.13078.pdf
Weidner & Kroupa (2003; limit from star clusters) https://arxiv.org/pdf/astroph/031086...

JWST proposal 1802 https://www.stsci.edu/jwst/phase2pub...

00:00 Introduction
00:50 The Initial Mass Function of stars with a lower and upper limit?
03:00 Simulating stars forming is there a physical process limiting the mass?
05:19 Finding the most massive star known R136a1
07:35 If we don't find more massive stars, does that mean there's really a limit?
07:57 How can JWST help solve this problem?
09:06 Brilliant
10:15 Bloopers

Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7 IV



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‍ I'm Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford (Christ Church). I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don't know. If you've ever wondered about something in space and couldn't find an answer online you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars.


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