R136a1

R136a1 (short for RMC 136a1) is the most massive and luminous star known, at around 291 solar masses () and around 7.2 million times the Sun's luminosity (). It is a Wolf–Rayet star at the center of R136, the central concentration of stars of the large NGC 2070 open cluster in the Tarantula Nebula (30 Doradus) in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The cluster can be seen in the far southern celestial hemisphere with binoculars or a small telescope, at magnitude 7.25. R136a1 itself is 100 times fainter than the cluster and can only be resolved using speckle interferometry. ==Discovery== thumb|left|upright=1.6|Zooming in from the Tarantula Nebula to the R136 cluster, with R136a1/2/3 visible as the barely resolved knot at bottom right In 1960, a group of astronomers working at the Radcliffe Observatory in Pretoria made systematic measurements of the brightness and spectra of bright stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Among the objects cataloged was RMC 136 (Radcliffe observatory Magellanic Cloud catalog number 136), the central "star" of the Tarantula Nebula, which the observers concluded was probably a multiple star system. Subsequent observations showed that R136 was located in the middle of a giant region of ionized interstellar hydrogen, known as an H II region, which was a center of intense star formation in the immediate vicinity of the observed stars.

In 1979, ESO's 3.6 m telescope was used to resolve R136 into three components; R136a, R136b, and R136c. The exact nature of R136a was unclear and a subject of intense discussion. Estimates that the brightness of the central region would require as many as 100 hot O class stars within half a parsec at the centre of the cluster led to speculation that a star 3,000 times the mass of the Sun was the more likely explanation.