According to a recent report in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a European team of astronomers have apparently discovered the heaviest star – dubbed R136a1 - which is two times as heavy as any other heavyweight star discovered thus far.

As per astronomers, R136a1 is a huge ball of burning gas, which is apparently 10 million times as luminous as the Sun.

Noting that such gigantic stars generally shed their weight through very fierce winds, the team of astronomers – led by astrophysicist Paul Crowther, of the University of Sheffield in northern England - said that it is quite likely that R136a1 once weighed nearly 320 solar masses!

Crowther added that R136a1 was identified at the center of a star cluster in the Tarantula Nebula, an expansive cloud of gas and dust in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy at a nearly 165,000 light-years distance from the Milky Way.

Saying that the stellar discovery will facilitate the astronomers’ understanding of the behavior of colossal stars, and their size at birth, Crowther elaborated that the R136a1 and several other individual hulking stars were discovered inside two young clusters of stars – namely, NGC 3603 and RMC 136a.

These ‘stellar nurseries’ were then observed closely, using instruments on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, as well as from the Hubble Space Telescope’s archival data.