Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope picture shows a galaxy named SBS
1415+437 or SDSS CGB 12067.1, located about 45 million light-years from
Earth. SBS 1415+437 is a Wolf–Rayet galaxy, a type of starbursting galaxy with an unusually high number of extremely hot and massive stars known as Wolf–Rayet stars.
These
stars can be around 20 times as massive as the Sun, but seem to be on a
mission to shed surplus mass as quickly as possible — they blast
substantial winds of particles out into space, causing them to dwindle
at a rapid rate. A typical star of this type can lose a mass equal to
that of our Sun in just 100 000 years!
These massive stars are
also incredibly hot, with surface temperatures some 10 to 40 times that
of the Sun, and very luminous, glowing at tens of thousands to several
million times the brightness of the Sun. Many of the brightest and most
massive stars in the Milky Way are Wolf–Rayet stars.
Because these
stars are so intense they do not last very long, burning up their fuel
and blasting their bulk out into the cosmos on very short timescale ‒
only a few hundred thousand years. Because of this it is unusual to find
more than a few of these stars per galaxy — except in Wolf–Rayet
galaxies, like the one in this image.
Source: ESA/Hubble - Space Telescope
