Indian scientist discovers super-giant star

Psudo-color GALEX ultraviolet image of the galaxy IC 3418 falling into the Virgo cluster. Notice the young star-forming clumps in its 55,000 light-years-long trail, as the galaxy moves towards the top-right area. Zooming into one of the blobs, marked by the arrow, the colour optical image from CFHT shows the bright Blue Supergiant star in the middle of the inset image in the top-left area.

Washington (PTI): An Indian scientist and his Taiwanese colleague have discovered a blue super-giant star located in the constellation Virgo, far beyond our Milky Way Galaxy.

Over 55 million years ago, the star emerged in an extremely wild environment, surrounded by intensely hot plasma (a million degrees centigrade) and amidst raging cyclone winds blowing at four million kilometres per hour.

Research using the Subaru Telescope, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX), and the Canada-France-Hawaii-Telescope (CFHT) revealed unprecedented views of the star formation process in this intergalactic context and showed the promise of future investigations of a possibly new mode of star formation, unlike that within our Milky Way.

About one thousand galaxies reside in a cluster filled with million-degree hot plasma and dark matter. The Virgo cluster, the nearest cluster of galaxies located about 55 million light years from Earth in the constellation Virgo, is an ideal laboratory to study the fate of gas stripped from the main body of galaxies falling into the intra-cluster medium.

The astronomer duo Dr Ananda Hota from UM-DAE Centre for Excellence in the Basic Sciences, India, and Dr Youichi Ohyama from Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica or ASIAA, Taiwan focused on the trail of IC 3418 to explore a potentially new mode of star formation.

Hota has been collecting data from multiple telescopes since 2006 to understand this galaxy, which he first spotted in the GALEX data during his research.