Is there a limit to how MASSIVE a STAR can be?

Go to https://brilliant.org/drbecky to get a 30-day 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 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v-l5_RZvZ5VE

Salpeter (1955; first analysis of the IMF) – https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/1955ApJ…121..161S
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/pdf/1971A%26A….13..190L
Nakano (1989; increasing the limit with models of star formation) – https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/1989ApJ…345..464N
Jijina & Adams (1996; increasing the limit with models of star formation) – https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/1996ApJ…462..874J
Feast, Thackery & Wesselink (1960; catalogue of stars in the Magellanic Clouds) – https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/121/4/337/2602312
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/astro-ph/0310860.pdf

JWST proposal 1802 – https://www.stsci.edu/jwst/phase2-public/1802.pdf

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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My new book, /”A Brief History of Black Holes/