OzHub, the Macquarie Telecom-led cloud computing alliance, has come down firmly on the side of Optus over the copyright controversy surrounding Optus TV Now, warning that any moves to change the law "risk branding Australia a global luddite state."
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William Atkins
Wednesday, 21 July 2010 23:44
Edited: Discovering a big Hollywood star these days is easy to do, but astronomers have a more difficult time when they try to locate really massive or really large stars. However, astronomers recently succeeded at finding the most massive star so far discovered in the Universe. Called R136a1, it is about 265 times more massive than our Sun.
Note (as of 11-2-2010): this article is titled largest star discovered, but actually the star is the most massive so far discovered. A star can be the largest one ever found, but not the most massive; conversely, it can be the most massive, but not the largest. In the case of R136a1, it is the most massive star so far found by humans.
Star R136a1 is almost 10 million times more luminous than the Sun. But, you won’t need your sunglasses to look at this star because it is about 164,000 light-years away in the Large Magellenic Cloud.
The Sun, for comparison, is a mere 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) away.
That is, while light (electromagnetic radiation) coming from R136a1 takes about 164,000 years to reach Earth, light coming off of the Sun takes only a matter of about 8 minutes to reach our eyes.
The star R136a1 (sometimes abbreviated R136) resides near the center of a cluster of hot, young, and very massive stars collectively called RMC 137a.
These stars are situated within the Tarantula Nebula (also called 30 Doradus, or NGC 2070), which is an H II region within the Large Magellenic Cloud, a near-by irregular galaxy to our own Milky Way galaxy. (LMV is the third closest galaxy to the Milky Way).
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