In a galaxy far, far away, in what's known as the Tarantula Nebula, there is a cluster of nine supermassive stars that puts our biggest, the Sun, to shame. This is huge because until now, astronomers didn't even know that stars could get as big. Photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope about 170,000 light-years from Earth is a cluster known as R136. R136 has nine huge stars, each of which is more than 100 times the size of our sun. They are so big that if these stars are put together they would outshine the sun 30 million times over.

Among these nine is R136a1, the biggest star to ever be found by mankind. Generally, stars this big are formed by smaller stars colliding and combining with each other, but astronomers studying the R136 believe that might not have been the case here. They believe such stars might have originated from the star formation process. According to NASA, there are only a handful of stars like these in all of the Milky Way galaxy.

Although humungous, these stars have a comparatively shorter lifespan. While a star like our sun lives for about 10 billion years, these stars would only live on for 2 to 3 millions years. They're so huge and luminous that they might be near the end of their life right now. They would keep swelling up and eject material until they eventually implode. Researchers believe that if the stars are close enough to each other, they could collapse into black holes which may collide with one another and produce gravitational waves. A statement issued by NASA/ESA says,"They eject up to an Earth mass of material per month at a speed approaching 1% of the speed of light, resulting in extreme weight loss throughout their brief lives."

Space and its mysterious ways. Insane, right?