The bright blue giant of the Southern Cross, called the Beta Crucis star, has been revealed as a heavy-weight champion.
A team of international scientists have discovered that a star called Beta crucis is the heaviest star in the universe and is just 11 years old.
The sun is 4.5 billion years old and has a mass of more than 300,000 Earths.
The Southern Cross is a significant symbol of nationhood for many countries and is used for navigation due to its visibility throughout the year in southern skies. It is known by at least eight different names in Mori and is subject to multiple interpretations, including an anchor, a sky canoe and a hole through which storm winds escape.
The team of scientists, led by Dr Daniel Cotton from the Australian National University and Monterey Institute for Research in Astronomy in the US, cracked the star's age and mass by combining asteroseismology, the study of a star's regular movements, with polarimetry.
Cotton wanted to investigate an old idea.
It was predicted in 1979 that polarimetry could measure the interiors of massive stars, but it has not been done yet.
A star's light is changed by the waves of seismic waves that bounce around the interior. It has traditionally been difficult to find the interiors of heavy stars that will explode.
The study used different types of light measurement. The first is using space-based data from two satellites. The second uses 13 years of ground-based high-resolution spectroscopy to study the absorption and emission of light and other radiation by matter.
It used ground-based polarimetry from the Siding Spring Observatory.
Prof Conny Aerts of KU Leuven in Belgium said that the stars are the most productive chemical factories of our galaxy, but they are so far the least analysed asteroseismically. The Australian polarimetrists are to be admired.
A new avenue for asteroseismology of bright massive stars has been opened by this polarimetric study.
The authors said the findings will provide new detail on how stars live and die, and how they affect the chemical evolution of the universe.
