the constellation sagittarius holds a hot and luminous celestial rarity that puts the
sun's soaring temperatures to shame the giant burning furnace is quickly nearing its death and
is headed towards a cataclysmic supernova explosion in a few thousand years and the
violent radiation threatens to scorch anything in its surrounding rare intense and short-lived
the star is truly one of a kind welcome to Factnomenal and today we'll be taking a
look at the most outrageously hot known star in the universe wr 102 evolution of a star
when you look into the night sky the stars we see are like shiny ornaments adorning a big
black backdrop as beautiful as they are these stars are actually constantly burning and fuse
elements like hydrogen to get helium making them extremely hot and giving them a luminous glow
the main source of their energy is the nuclear reactions taking place deep inside the core of
the stars with elements like lithium oxygen carbon and hydrogen being a part of the process at higher
temperatures as a result of these nuclear reactions elements like magnesium phosphorus
and sulfur are also given out they have very high charges and therefore require more energy as they
repel each other very strongly more new energy is then needed to push back against their resistance
stars burn very bright and eventually die out some may take years to do so while some meet
a very sudden explosive end take a main sequence star for example when the star finally burns all
of its hydrogen fuel it will swell up to become a red giant after the puffing up of the outer layers
the star will begin to collapse and ultimately form a dense white dwarf a white dwarf is said
to be so dense that even a teaspoon full of its matter would weigh as much as an elephant on
earth or five and a half tons but there are some stars in the universe much larger than our sun
that don't really follow the same pattern they tend to lose their mass very very quickly when
these stars ultimately run out of the elements that they confuse the star is forced to cool
down and the immense pressure within the star ceases and gravity proves to be the ultimate
winner and causes it to collapse onto itself and if there's still sufficient mass left the star
would then turn into a black hole but massive supergiant stars end up shedding their mass
in record time and combined with the pressure explode into a supernova these supermassive stars
the candidates for the final pre-supernova stage are called Wolf Reyette stars
the rare hot giants Wolf Reyette at galaxies are a rather rare population of galaxies that are known
to host living high mass stars what really makes this galaxy so special is its highly
unusual number of giant shimmering and brightly burning stars called the wolf ray at stars
these stars represent the final burst of activity before the star begins to die when it comes to
size it's safe to say they are nothing less than stellar behemoths with the stars being on average
20 times more massive than the sun one of their peculiar features is the fact that they shed
their surplus mass as quickly as they possibly can as if they cannot wait to be rid of it while
blasting substantial gusts of particles into space thus causing them to dwindle at an alarming rate
named after the french astronomers Charles Wolf and George Reyette who discovered them in 1867
these types of stars can lose the entire mass of our sun in just about
100 000 years not only are they massive but they are also known for being incredibly hot
they boast of surface temperatures that are 10 to 40 times that of the sun the average temperature
of a wolf Wolf Reyette type star is greater than 25,000 kelvin and has been said that the powerful
winds that are emitted by these burning heated objects are driven by intense radiation pressure
wool frayed stars shine several million times brighter than the sun
almost like bright led bulbs in space given their scorching temperatures in large size
the downside of this though is that because they burn so bright and big they do tend to die out
very quickly so while the sun is busy turning hydrogen into helium these stars are plowing
through the elements like oxygen just to try and keep equilibrium the stars live comparatively
short and intense lives which makes them so rare to find except in the wolfray galaxy of course
in fact most of the biggest and brightest stars in our milky way are Wolf Reyette type stars no
surprise there further Wolf Reyette type stars are divided into two major subtypes
wn with lines of helium and nitrogen ions that can be seen wc which contain lines of
carbon and oxygen in addition to helium ions a minor subtype wo containing strong ovi lines
has been recently discovered the hottest known star wr 102 belongs to the spectral category wo2
with soaring temperatures that will make you sweat just thinking about it
too hot to handle lying in the constellation sagittarius wr 102 was first thought to be
an optical counterpart to an odd x-ray source gx3 plus one upon further studying this bright oddity
it soon became clear that it was a completely separate object in 1971 it was given the status of
a luminous star and was noted to have ovi emission lines in its spectrum that were not very casual
initially it became classified as a wc star after concluding that it wasn't the central star of
a planetary nebula but it still remained rather unusual owing to its highly ionized emission lines
it varied in its brightness and was given the variable star designation v389 Sagittarii
but it wasn't the only one and soon in 1982 a set of five highly luminous stars were discovered
bearing similar highly ionized emission lines of wr-102 these highly evolved massive stars along
with wr 102 were then used to identify the wo class of Wolf Reyette type stars
opening a new avenue of study for scientists and astronomers to put it plainly wo type
Wolf Reyette stars are very similar to the wc type with very substantial amounts of oxygen
as for now there are only six known oxygen sequence Wolf Reyette type stars in the universe
and wr102 is the hottest of them all with a scorching surface temperature of 210 000 kelvin
wr-102 has certainly set some new records for all the burning objects in space to put that into
perspective for you the surface temperature of the sun is around 5 800 kelvin making the wr-102 star
more than 200 000 degrees hotter the next time you think it's getting too hot just be glad our planet
is not anywhere near wr-102 stars follow a fairly simple formula that can be understood as the more
the mass of the star the brighter it becomes the colder stars are typically more red while
the hotter ones have a bluish color to them the hot star therefore appears to have a bluish color
since wr-102 as a wolf ray at star doesn't follow the usual path to becoming a red giant
its outer hydrogen layers get blown apart and leave behind the more heavier elements
with strongly ionized atoms of carbon oxygen as well as nitrogen it shines brilliantly in the
sky and makes it the hottest star ever discovered when compared to the other famous giant stars like
the great betelgeuse in the constellation Orion it is much cooler at 3646 kelvin
and can be seen with a red hue on the other hand the brightest star in the universe Sirius or the
dog star has a slight blue tinge and comes in at 9940 kelvin still lagging far behind at wr-102
wr-102 is one of three wolf freya stars that have a temperature of 200 000 kelvin or more
the other being wr 142 in Cygnus and lmc 195-1 in the large Magellanic Cloud nevertheless
the title for the hottest known star in the universe has been rightfully claimed by wr 102
supernova in the making with soaring temperatures stars quickly begin running out of fuel which in
turn causes the star to start cooling down this brings the pressure down drastically
and ultimately gravity wins out and the star is faced with a sudden collapse just imagine
a gigantic object that's equal to a million times the mass of our earth collapsing within
mere seconds ultimately the shock waves from the collapse result in a violent explosion of
the outer layers of the star and that very explosion is what we know as a supernova
scientists are estimating that in the next 1500 years wr-102 will explode into a supernova
when it comes to stars this is the next big step and looks like our favorite hot star is in for a
promotion since Wolf Reyette type stars represent the last evolutionary stage of any massive star
before they shed their outer layers and eventually explode into supernovae and we can clearly
see that wr102 is already well on its way to a cataclysmic explosion it's likely that the star is
in the final stages of nuclear fusion and drawing closer to the end of the helium burning stage with
the fact that the star is thousands of light years away from planet earth it's highly likely that wr
102 has already been bumped up to supernova status which we will only have evidence of years and
years later perhaps it's a good thing that we are light years away and out of reach so that we won't
be harmed by the possible gamma-ray burst or grb that is a result of high mass and rapid rotation
during a stellar collapse we'd sure appreciate not being burned to a crisp by the radiation
supernovas outshine all the other stars in the galaxy for a short while before ultimately fading
the remnant of the massive star which went supernova is a neutron star which is among the
densest and brightest objects in the universe now scientists have their attention on wr-102
not just because of its exceptionally fiery temperatures and rapid loss of mass but because
it is a great candidate to go supernova in the near future at least that we know of
one thing is for certain wr-102 has a very bright future ahead of it
so what do you think will wr 102 be the next big supernova or supermassive black hole let
us know in the comments below please like and share the video and don't forget to subscribe
to the channel for more videos like this thanks for watching and see you next time